


The Spiral

by starkadder



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, And Modern Hollstein, Angst, Character Death, Early Medieval Hollstein, F/F, Historical, Reincarnation, Soulmates if you squint a bit, Tam Lin - Freeform, Victorian Hollstein, three AUs for the price of one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-01-10 18:30:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 60,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12305112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkadder/pseuds/starkadder
Summary: Silas Hill, in picturesque Shropshire, where a trio of stories are unfolding.In the present day, Carmilla and Laura take up residence in Carmilla's long-empty family home only to discover that though the past might be buried it may not be entirely dead. In 1872, Mircalla and Elle find themselves trying to hold together amid forces both tangible and ghostly. And in the chaos of the fifth century, Holly is trapped in a desperate struggle to survive in which her only ally is a dangerous and unstable woman named Karn.Three interlocking AUs with three different versions of Hollstein and in three different time periods - but all in the same place.





	1. The Chalice

_And what of the terrified spirit_  
_Compelled to be reborn_  
_To rise toward the violent sun_  
_Wet wings into the rain cloud_  
_Harefoot over the moon?_  
          T.S. Eliot, _The Family Reunion_  


They stood together on the stone steps, Laura clutching her bags and watching Carmilla watch the house. She matched the staring of the blank and staring windows for a few seconds and then unfocused back into the present.

“Well, here we are. Back at the House of Usher. Let me grab those, cupcake.” She took the bags from Laura’s hands, the big one with their clothes and the small one with bathroom stuff, and lugged them to the door.  
Laura returned to the car, splashing the puddles up on the gravel, and started pulling the rest of their luggage out of the boot. The wind blew shudders of rain into whichever side she didn’t shield with her body and she hurried off her coat to cover the open box of books with. She laid it all in a line on the damp stone porch: books and clothes and more books and films to watch on wet afternoons. Carmilla was still fiddling with the huge ring of keys and trying to find which combination of them would open the front door.

Inside was dim until they found the switch beside the door. It wasn’t the decrepit haunted house full of cobwebs and the skeletons of beetles Laura had half expected, but well kept if a little dusty in the corners. The structure of the place was clearly old but the lights were bright and the windows double-glazed and modern. Wooden beams in the ceiling were neatly sanded down and sealed against the invasions of spiders. Carmilla gathered up a pile of letters obstructing the mat and dumped them on a side table with the disconnected phone and unused letter holder. She knew perfectly well where she was going and started dragging the suitcases up the stairs.

Laura piled the bags of food up in the kitchen. There was indeed the obligatory cavernous farmhouse sink and the enamelled iron range just like all these old houses in the country were meant to have, but there was also a digital radio and a fancy many-bladed food processor. Outside the kitchen windows the garden went on flat for ten yards of uncut grass with a rusted washing line before resuming the slope of the hill and disappearing upwards. The cupboards were bare except where something had been forgotten in dark corners. Some stock cubes crumbled slowly on the back of a shelf. An unopened box of wafers displayed a sell-by date of seven years previous. There were mousetraps, all mercifully unused and with undisturbed bait.

Feet came down the stairs, Carmilla’s heavy way of thumping her heels down like she had a grudge against the ground. “Dumped our stuff in the green guest room,” she announced as she came in to help.

“Oh, in the _green_ guest room.” Laura emphasised and got her waist pinched as punishment for the mockery, which only made her giggle more. “I am so very relieved to have a place in the _green_ guest room. I suppose all the other guest rooms are full up for the busy season?”

Carmilla knelt down and rooted around behind the fridge for the switch to turn it on. “Well, my old room is a bit small for two, and I didn’t want to use – well. You know. Anyway, the green guest room. Come on, I’ll show you.”

There were in fact two guest rooms, a red one and a green one, right at the top of the stairs with the green one on the left. A double bed spread in a pleasant dull green, the polished wooden floor mostly covered by a huge Turkish rug in green and cream, curtains in emerald. Everything neat, everything in its place, already prepared by the absent caretaker. The window faced west across the tumble of countryside that was probably also green in a good light, although it was currently hard to tell under the sheets of rain and cover of the clouds.

Out of the heated car and stripped of her coat, Laura shivered. “Do we have to build a fire to keep warm?” she asked. She eyed with skepticism the green-tiled fireplace. It looked disused, the kind of thing that probably had a bird’s nest balanced precariously over the flue and possibly a dead cat stuck halfway up. Carmilla kissed the back of her neck and demonstrated the badly-positioned radiator lurking in an alcove.

That felt better. The potential cosiness of the room started to reveal itself along with the knocking sound coming out of the resurrecting central heating. It just needed some books on its shelves (and they had plenty of those), some of Carmilla’s endless collection of punk rock t-shirts spilling out of the wardrobe (it would take only a minute before her girlfriend’s mess was everywhere) and some cocoa (she’d made sure to buy some of the good stuff). Laura beamed. “Lovely place you’ve got here, Miss Karnstein. I might even stay the night if you play your cards right.”

She got a smile for that and was pleased. Carmilla was still looking pale – that is, paler than usual – but the morning’s low spirits seemed to have lifted. She hooked her fingers into Laura’s belt loops and pulled the two of them close.

“Well, I’m certainly feeling lucky, cupcake. Now. We missed lunch and there’s a huge pile of ludicrously expensive food downstairs. You get us set up. I’m finding which one of all those keys will get me into the cellar.”

“Are you planning to eat dirt instead of croissants?” Laura wondered. “Is there some dark and ancient secret down there? Ooh, have you got an identical twin kept in an iron mask?”

“Nope!” She grinned. “ _Wine_.”

Back in the kitchen again Laura pulled open a dozen little packages of cheese and meat. Fresh bread from a baker in Ludlow. Some pâté that Carmilla insisted on buying despite it being worth apparently more than its weight in gold. There was the sound of Carmilla jingling keys in the little alcove under the stairs. Apparently nobody had been down there since the house was closed up and even the quarterly visit by the caretaker didn’t involve doing anything to the wine store.

Seven years. She wondered how the house felt about the sudden reappearance of residents. Maybe it had picked up its own habits in their absence, like a student suddenly donning a new personality once they were separated form their parents for the first time. Or maybe it was pleased to have them back – it must surely recognise Carmilla who had grown up here. Or maybe it had preferred its solitude, nothing to disturb its slow communion with the hill.

She finished her arranging of food, took a few mouthfuls of smoked cheese for good measure, restored the look of the plate so as to hide her theft, and set the great big oak table in the dining room. It was not huge, not something out of palaces and mansions, but it could easily seat a dozen and the cabinets around it had a better quality of glass and china than what was in the kitchen.

There was also a collection of silver-framed photographs on one of the shelves. Carmilla’s face as a a baby, as a girl, as a child. None of her as an adult, nothing after the time she went to university. In the earliest of pictures she was with a severe, dark-bearded man whose deep ascetic eyes surprised Laura after a moment with their hidden laughter. But after he disappeared there was only the impeccable woman with her hand firmly on Carmilla’s shoulder, red-haired and imperious. Laura made a face and laid them face down. After a second’s thought she ran upstairs past the open cellar door to empty out a box of books onto the floor and hurried back to shovel the offending frames into it. She opened cupboards here and then until she found one with enough space to shove the box in.

“What’re you rooting around for, cupcake?”

Laura almost banged her head pulling herself out of the sideboard. She pushed the door closed behind her and smiled innocently.

“I was trying to decide whether we deserve fine china for our lunch. But then I thought the words ‘dishwasher safe’ and I think we deserve to not do washing up even more than we deserve crystal glasses.”

“You know me well. Red, white or champagne?” She had a sample of the cellar in her arms, aged well and with a promising amount of dust clinging to them.

“God, can we drink all of them?”

“Obviously. I mean, which do you want first?”

* * *

“So where are the ghosts?” Laura asked, when the meal had wound down to the stage of lounging in the depths of the sofa and not quite giving up on the idea of more wine.

“Don’t have any,” Carmilla shrugged. “Not that I know of.” She frowned at the one of the side tables and Laura followed her eyes to a photograph that had been missed in the purge. Laura tweaked her face away from it and made a mental note.

“Oh come on! Great big Gothic pile like this?” She brought the conversation back on track. “I bet there are... nuns! Like a whole coven of oath-breaking nuns roaming the corridors from back when this was a cursed abbey. I was planning to dredge up your ancestral history for a best-selling novel. You’d get a cut of the royalties,” she wheedled.

Carmilla’s face developed the familiar combination of amusement and bemusement. “This was built in, like 1800 or something, so as far as I know no cursed abbeys. Also I’m pretty sure nuns come in convents, not covens.”

“Killjoy.” She ran through possible ghost variations. “Headless horsemen?” Carmilla shook her head. “Black dogs at the crossroads? No? Um, weeping ladies standing on bridges? How about a nice banshee on the hilltop?”

“Nothing like that,” she said, but relented. “Must be something somewhere nearby though. There are stone circles down by The Rowls, there’s probably tales there.”

“Could be fairies rather than ghosts there.” Laura considered the bestiary.

“You’re probably right. Well. We shall have to dig a few up for you, hey?” She glanced at the window. “The rain’s stopped. Fancy a walk? We can blow away some cobwebs and I’ll show you where we unaccountably lack a banshee.”

Laura took the long way to the door and wordlessly pushed the offending photograph face down. 

Water was dripping from gutters and the hillside was filled with the sound of gurgling streams when they came out into the indecisive light, but the rain itself had largely stopped. Laura tested a puddle with her wellington boots before jumping straight in it with a great splash and laughing at Carmilla rolling her eyes. Leaf mould and the smell of wet rock hung in the damp air.

The distance faded into a drizzly haze. The house stood halfway up Silas Hill, balancing precariously in a little ledge set into the hillside. There was enough room for the building itself, no small thing, as well as the little back garden and enough gravelled space in front to park a car. Below and above and to left and right the slope resumed, so the house seemed an interruption in something larger, a bubble suspended in the landscape. Beyond the tiny circle of the stone-topped bank was all rough grass, tussocks and rushes. Crabbed hawthorn trees stood here and there, patches of heather and gorse. Down at the bottom of the hill were tangled woods, sullen in their near-bareness.

The hill was steep and by the time they reached the rock-crowned top Carmilla was out of breath and even Laura was relieved to take a few moments to rest.

“Should not have had all that wine.”

“You had a glass and a half, creampuff.”

“That’s a lot for me!” Laura stood and stretched. “I’m a glass and a half of a girl. Are there any bikes in the house?” she asked suddenly. “No? We should get bikes! Look at all that.” She spread her arms to the tumbled landscape below them. Silas Hill was a long ridge, south to north, and there were bigger hills a mile or two to the west so that the country beyond, which Silas House looked out onto, was a patchwork of small fields, small hills, small woods, all caught up in a little world of their own. There were farms here and there, houses in small straggled clusters, a jumbled mosaic of country under churning layers of cloud.

Carmilla extended her hands plaintively from her rock seat and Laura hauled her to her feet. They walked along the crest. There were three points along the ridge where blocky piles of rock jutted out from the ground and when they got to the first Laura scrambled up by the joints to stand at the highest point. A trio of disturbed crows fled the tor, cawing a vain protest.

“Ki-yee!” she screeched out at the wind.

“What?”

“I thought I’d fill in for the banshee!” Carmilla laughed at the sight of a banshee in chunky purple knitwear and trainers. “What’s that to the east?” She pointed out over a low flat valley to another long ridge sulking under dark clouds.

“The Long Mynd. If you want to go cycling, along the top of that’s the way.”

Laura scrambled down to rejoin Carmilla. She turned to the west, to the huddle of landscape that lay at the foot of Silas House.

“What’s that one?” she asked, pointing at a high hill crowned with a piled rock fringe.

“Corndon Hill. That’s actually in Wales, sort of a sticky-out bit. Most of the border’s along the Dyke a mile back.” Laura snorted with childish humour and Carmilla mimed cuffing her round the head. “That double hill’s The Rowls, the stone circles are at the bottom. Pennerley. Shelve. Round Hill. Perkins Beach.”

A gust of wind hit the hilltop and Laura was half-convinced she saw one of the milling crows fly backwards for a moment under its force. “Let’s get somewhere with a little less blow. What’s at the bottom?”

“Ah!” She raised her eyebrows, suggesting a great secret. “The fountain.”

The way down was slippery and Carmilla had to haul Laura up by the scruff of the neck a couple of times to stop her skidding down. The bottom of the hill came suddenly, the ground righting itself and dropping them onto a path that snaked around its base through thin bands of woodland. Over the first bend was the fountain, set back into a recess.

‘Fountain’ was an approximate name. It was a natural spring near the base of the hill, and someone once upon a time had cut back into the rock to set it free. They had quarried out a part of the hillside about ten feet square to where the water trickled from a grey fissure. Below the outfall they had cut down further to make a pool to hold the water and let it settle. And at the downward end a notch cut into the lip of the pool allowed the overflow to escape and tumble down as a tiny stream. It was perhaps big enough for one person to sit or lie in. Fallen leaves covered the gently rippling surface and on the stone wall behind it, a spiral was carved.

“Whose?” asked Laura. Her hair was still tangled by the wind up above, but down here below the house and under the shelter of a thin wood the pink sting was fading from her cheeks.

“What?”

“Aren’t springs like this usually somebody’s? Like, St Brigid’s or St Chad’s or St Whoever’s?”

Carmilla shrugged. “Probably. But I never heard any name. Creampuff, you do know what leptospirosis is, right?” she added as Laura dipped her hand in and cautiously tasted the water.

She wrinkled her nose. “Tastes like mould.”

“Yeah. That’s the best case. Tastes like death if you dip deep enough, it’s probably full of dead voles and God knows what else.”

“So much for crystal clear mountain streams.”

Past the fountain was a thicker tangle of woodland, most of the leaves now gone. Jackdaws were gathered in the upper branches and the place broke out into a chorus of clanging caws when the girls passed through.

“It’s called Silas Wood, but it’s not ours. Not mine, I mean. I mean, not ours,” Carmilla corrected herself. “It doesn’t go with the house is what I mean.”

There had clearly been a storm not long before and scattered branches lay on the ground where they had been ripped off. There was even a whole fallen tree collapsed in wreckage with its roots thrown up and a dark hole in the earth underneath them. They skirted it and Laura caught a glimpse of something glinting in the dark.

“Hey!” Laura abruptly dropped Carmilla’s hand and hurried forward to kneel on the ripped earth under the roots of the fallen tree.

“Laura, what-”

She ignored her and threw off her gloves. She pushed her bare hands into the muddy earth and heaved at something only poking out by the glinting corner. Carmilla leaned frowning over her shoulder. Laura had gotten hold of something; she pulled at it against the resistance of roots and earth.

“What is it?”

“It’s stuck.” She wriggled the thing in her grip and turned it this way and that. The roots finally tore apart and it came loose, showering lumps of mud and leaf mould over the both of them. Scrambling to her feet she held it up glinting in the light.

“It’s a cup.”

“It’s a chalice.”

The word of Carmilla’s was more appropriate. The mud coated it and there was a thick tarnish underneath that but it was an elaborate piece and clearly made of silver. It sat heavy in her hand, a deep bowl six inches across and a long ribbed stem leading to a wide base. Around the sides was some kind of design, but it was entirely indistinguishable under the muck.

“It was tangled in the roots,” Laura said with wonder. She sat down on the fallen trunk and tried to measure around it with her arms. “How old’s the tree?”

Carmilla kicked the almost bare branches thoughtfully. A fungus split under her boot. “Not old-old. Sycamore grows quickly. But it’s not exactly planted yesterday, is it?”

“A hundred years?”

“Could be. Could be two hundred.” She looked up and around at the canopy. “The tree anyway. Bet you the chalice is older though. Wonder how it got here.”

* * *

The village lay in smoke and broken wood. Crows were starting to find it but the smoke kept away flies, at least for now. Holly lay hidden in the barn that was more whole than any other building and waited until the sound of the men leaving had gone. Then she waited more.

She had feared fire in the stock of hay but the smoke was not from great burning. Some huts were ashes smouldering under the fallen damp of their thatch and patches of grass were singed but there had been too much rain last night and the men had not tried to destroy everything. They had rather chosen to take and go.

One woman, the one with the blue shawl who had been kind to her last night, was lying in the doorway. Holly held a barn post until she stopped wanting to be sick. There were others in the open. A man by the well was without a head and seeing him she did have to throw up. She spat out the taste and stepped round the other side to try a bucket from the well. The rope stuck at first but she began to pull the bucket in. When the water off the rope started to run red on her hands she gave up.

She tried to think about what was the best thing to do. Her bag was empty and she might fill it from whatever the men had not taken, but that would mean going into the huts and some of them had bad feelings lurking around the doors. Instead she walked the stockade and tried to see if anyone was coming to the smoke. The stakes were taller than her and she had to jump to catch glimpses. There was nobody and no animals left. The walk made her pause. She had come from the north, from the lowland passage between the hills, but where had the men come from? And which way had they gone? She tried to make sense of the mud around the gate, but it was all churned.

“Well don’t you look lost.”

The woman had arrived without her noticing. She stood in the centre of the village, surveying Holly and the wreckage without surprise or fear. Black hair and she looked slight, but there was an axe hanging from her belt and it was both old and sharp. Holly edged towards the gate.

“You do all this, pretty girl?” She nudged the headless man at the well with her foot and wandered over to duck her head inside one of the huts. She came out with a wrinkled nose but no distress on her face.

“Who are you?”

“No one you know. I am called Karn, if it matters. Don’t just stand there gawking, help me with this.” She had got the bucket from the well pulled up almost to the top but it was jammed under the cross-beam. Holly approached slowly, then hurried forward as Karn rolled her eyes at her fear.

“I tried it. There was blood in the water.” Together they got it past the jam and balanced the bucket on the stone lip. The water inside was stained pink.

“I noticed.” Karn cupped bloody water in her hand and drank. “Ignore it if you like, but it’s the only drink here.” She met Holly’s horrified expression, sighed, and then dropped the bag slung across her to find an almost-empty waterskin. She handed it to Holly who took it gratefully and found the last swallow of water clean. When she was finished Karn filled it again.

“So.” Karn hitched herself onto the stone and waved around at the destruction. “How long ago?”

“About dawn, or a bit after. I was sleeping in the barn. My name is Holly,” she added even though Karn hadn’t asked.

“Not so popular with your family, sweetheart?”

“This isn’t my home. I was just passing through.”

“Well you can pass a bit faster now. Any food left?” Holly shook her head. “Didn’t think so. Which way were you going?”

“South.”

“Give up on that idea, at least round here. Either you’ll catch them up or have to root through whatever they leave behind. North is bad too, there are people on the road and not the gentle kind. Want my advice, go east and pick up the road into Venonis. Anyway, I’m going to grab what I can and go. Nice talking to you.”

She slipped down and ducked into one of the remaining huts, hand clamped over her nose and mouth. Holly stared until she came back with an armful of things left behind. She did it twice more until there was a small pile of neglected salvage in the middle of the village. She sifted through.

“I’m taking the knife and the tinderbox. Rest of it’s no use to me so have what you want. The green cloak would suit you,” she added unexpectedly and held it out.

“Those are not your-”

“The man with the spear hole in his chest isn’t going to use it. Be sensible.” Holly took both the point and the green cloak. It was too long for her but it was warm and would do as a blanket as well. She cinched it up so it hung to her knee and tried to smile, but Karn seemed to take this as a sign that the meeting was over. She slung her bag back on, checked the axe at her belt, and turned on her heel.

“Wait!” Holly scurried after her.

“Anything in particular you wanted, pretty girl?” She raised a sharp eyebrow and when Holly had gulped down her answer she started walking again.

“Aren’t we going together?”

“What gave you that idea?”

Holly managed to fall into step. “You said I should go east, and if you’re going east-”

“You go east. I’m going west.”

“But why?”

Karn gave her a look. “Because it’s where I’m going to. You’ve got no reason to be up there, so go the other way. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll find some salt train to tag on with and get south that way. Or just wander around and starve, whatever you like. None of my affair.”

“I don’t-” she paused. “I don’t really have anywhere to go. I mean I don’t know where I’m going, not really.”

“Then it doesn’t matter if you go that way.” Karn stopped and point up at the low hills in the east. “Off you trot.”

“I want to go with you.” It came out unexpectedly, and Holly hadn’t known that she did want to go with her until she heard the words coming out of her own mouth.

“Why?”

Because you gave me water and a cloak, she wanted to say. And because it’s not safe to be alone but it’s not safe to be in any party with men in either. And because you look like you know how to use that axe but you didn’t try to use it on me. She didn’t say any of those but Karn could see them easily in her eyes.

“Because we can help each other. You might need another pair of eyes. For finding food. Or, I don’t know, help crossing rivers. Or something.”

Karn sighed. She did seem to be thinking about it. “Look, you can’t come with me where I’m going but that’s in three days’ time. You can come with me for three days and that will get you away from the worst of the war. Probably. But then you leave, understand?”

“Understand.”

“Come on then. We’re going uphill.”

They left by the mud-churned gate. Holly glanced fearfully up and down the valley but Karn seemed to have the measure of where danger was. She marched across the meadows surrounding the village and plunged into the woods on the other side. The path up the hill was ahead of them and she led the way without speaking.

“Do you know what’s happening?” Holly asked when the village was a little way behind. “The fighting?”

Karn shrugged. “Bit of a shuffle around, that’s all. The old sod in Glevum finally kicked it and his sons all went missing so everyone’s grabbing what they can. The Caer Isca lot are staying out of it for now.”

“The Dux?” The path widened and Holly skipped forward enough to see Karn’s frowning face.

“He calls himself that.” She snorted. “Dux Brittaniorum or at least of all the Britains that will listen to him which is not many. But you might go there when we part ways. Not the worst place and you’ll not be too far off.”

“Where are you going?”

“A hill. Further west.”

“Why?”

“There’s a fountain and somebody I’m meeting. And that’s enough questions. I can still change my mind.”

The hill was steep but not high. At the top of the crest they paused and looked down. In the low land below there was nobody moving and the ruins of the village were hung about with crows.

* * *

The carriage shook and shuddered on the stony road. Mircalla had the way of wedging herself in amongst the walls and cushions and it didn’t bother her, but Elle was accustomed to surfaced turnpikes in the Home Counties and every pothole took her by surprise. The front of the little hansom cab had been covered over by a stretched oilskin against the rain and only the small windows to the left and right let in any light at all. Inside was shadowy and closed away from the outside world, but they hid their entwined hands under a cushion nevertheless.

A wheel went over a pothole. “Silas Hill, in picturesque Shropshire,” Elle muttered, “where nothing, not even the passage of the nineteenth century, can make travelling pleasant.” She glowered out at the landscape before noticing the amusement on Mircalla’s face. She stuck her tongue out and returned to the window.

Outside the country was turning a land of mirrors. The uneven fields were drenched by the morning’s rain and every pool was now an image of the piled grey of the sky. Here and there the pastures were peppered with jackdaws flitting from one reflection to another. Trees shone out from their last leaves and the trunks were grey in the light. It had been a long day.

They had left London bright and early that morning, the autumn sun pleasant through the glass roof of Paddington Station. The gangly platform porter had hurried to be the one to help the two pretty ladies with their luggage and had blushed scarlet when Elle smiled at him. They had gone off in splendidly exciting fashion. But after hours of sinking into the increasingly uncomfortable seats surrounded by heavily snoring mustachioed men, the excitement had palled. And then they were at Hereford and the sky darkened under rainclouds while they waited for the next train to take them to Craven Arms. Then finally the old hansom cab to complete the journey, stuffy and dark in the oilclothed confinement.

“How much further?” she asked, staring out at the distant hills glowering in the west.

Mircalla shrugged. “Not long. We’re on the other side of the Long Mynd now. Home isn’t much further.”

She picked at the hem of her sleeve. “What’s your mother like?”

“She’s… my mother. She’ll like you.” Mircalla tried to put confidence in her voice. “She didn’t fly into a rage when I asked to bring you, so that bodes well.”

“How could you tell?”

“Her handwriting gets jagged when she’s angry. I can tell.”

“And what did you tell her? About us?”

Mircalla smirked. “I told her it’s the done thing in London for a young lady living alone to have a live-in lady’s companion to offer improving conversation and moral guidance in the these troublesome days. The best families are never without them, I said. And we _are_ the best family if she has anything to do with it. There’s not much competition around here. So she was pleased.”

Ell drew herself up, insofar as was possible, in mock outrage. “Are you hinting my conversation is not improving, ‘Calla?”

“I am hinting that if you were to tell Maman how deeply we have been discussing A Pilgrim’s Progress and the tremendous spiritual lessons we are drawing from it, she’d be less likely to get suspicious. And recite some improving maxims and remind me to sit up straight.”

“But you never sit up straight. Ever.”

“Well, you could at least say you’re trying. Setting a good example with your calisthenics or whatever that stretchy gymnastic thing you do is called.” Mircalla let out a tense sigh and sank back into the cushions. Elle met her eyes and leaned over to pull the blind over the carriage window. She edged closer and Mircalla’s hand found hers.

“Don’t worry,” she told her. “It’ll be fine. Isn’t this just your thing? Us two, alone in the countryside? All those woods to get lost in?”

“Hmm, that does sound nice.” Mircalla dipped her head and her voice purred along Elle’s neck. “It’ll be cold out, though. It already is.”

“You can warm me up, I’m sure.”

The mood was somewhat interrupted by the sudden pitching of the carriage upwards. Elle and Mircalla found themselves suddenly reclining at forty-five degrees as the road ceased heading for Silas Hill and started ascending it. The road up was muddy and rutted and the jolting of potholes was replaced by the swaying from one rut to another. Mircalla laughed at their predicament and hung on to the door handle as if to the railing of a ship in a storm.

The uncomfortable ascent did not last long and soon Wilson had parked the carriage and was letting down the steps to let the girls out. Mircalla shook off his helping hand and insisted on helping Elle down herself. Silas House loomed up above them, three floors of grey stone roofed in slate and the windows shuttered against the autumn wind. It dripped from every overhang and with the drooping vegetation of the hill dripping too, it seemed a part of the place, an outgrowth of the hill made of the same stone given form.

They were in a sort of bowl or shelf perched halfway up Silas Hill, big enough for a large house and a small yard in front of it but no more. The lip of the bowl was mounded up very slightly with stones set in the bank, and outside its confines there was rough grass, rushes, heather and gorse. Rocks jutted out here and there. The house looked west over a rumpled patchwork of soaked farms and woods to the higher hills marking the beginning of Wales. Elle stared at it all. She almost expected a horse bearing a wild-haired young man with the devil in his face to come galloping over the horizon, but he did not manifest. In the question of brooding lovers she much preferred Mircalla in any case.

Mircalla reached out to put an arm around her waist, but remembered there were other people around and thought better of it. She turned it into a pretence of removing a trailing thread from the back of her green coat instead. Elle gave her a sympathetic look. Behind them Wilson rapped smartly on the door and, obviously already aware of their approach, three women came hurrying out.

“No Mother?” asked Mircalla after waiting a few moments for a fourth to appear.

“She’s still away in Bristol, Miss,” said the first woman, the one with a pleasant but nervous face who looked more like a housekeeper than anyone Elle had ever met. “She didn’t mention that in her letter?”

Mircalla shook her head. “No, strangely enough she didn’t think to mention it.”

“She’s expected back the day after tomorrow. Oh! I’m Perry, dear. You must be Elle.”

Elle smiled a greeting. Perry was neat, excessively neat, and starched. She hovered back a bit before crossing the boundaries and giving Mircalla a hug, which was unusually reciprocated. There was even fondness in Mircalla’s smile back.

The two maids were brought forward and introduced as Sarah-Jane and Natalie or possibly the other way round. They were both small, clustered under caps, and meek. Mircalla spared them barely a look but Elle tried to be polite before Perry dismissed them back inside to their duties.

Perry ushered Mircalla and Elle inside behind them, sidestepping the pile of suitcases that Wilson was stacking up inside the door. Inside was dingy. The lamps in their stands were old-fashioned: oil lamps, Elle realised, not the bright gas lights she was used to from back in London. She supposed it must be difficult to get gas this far up a hill. Wooden beams in the ceiling – dark, shadowy, cracked. But not dusty – the house might have been old and rustic but it was clean and from the spotlessness of Perry’s apron Elle could see the reason. The carpets underfoot were heavy, dark-swirled Turkish patterns.

“I’ll have Wilson put your luggage in your old room, Miss,” she said to Mircalla. “If your companion would like to choose from the guest rooms-”

“Elle will stay with me,” Mircalla said. “In my room.” She stared Perry down.

Her face was suddenly very tight. “Ah. Your mother-”

“Will no doubt want to annoy everyone by insisting on some elaborate accommodation plan she’s drawn up to make herself feel important. But she’s not here yet and Elle will stay with me. We’re quite used to it, and it means we shan’t need to trouble the maids with dressing or brushing our hair.”

Perry leaned closer and hissed, “It might be easier if it weren’t so obvious-”

“Obvious, Perry? Obvious what? What is obvious?”

They held the battle of wills for a moment and Perry was the one to crumple first. “Nothing, Miss. I’m sure you know best.”

Mircalla took pity on her. “Thank you, Perr. It’ll be alright, you don’t need to worry. You understand. People do not consider.”

Perry nodded reluctantly and shied away from Elle’s attempt at an encouraging smile. “Very well. I’ll bring all of the luggage to your room.”

* * *

The attic resembled a city of skyscrapers all made of cardboard boxes. Laura and Carmilla moved carefully through the blocks and streets, keeping their eyes on the floorboards with their rough patches and occasional sticking up nails. This appeared to be the refuge of the spiders not seen elsewhere in the house, and other things that lurked in the woodwork.

“Any idea where we might find some?”

“Um… not really. Let’s see.” She looked into a few boxes in one associated stack. “These are blankets I think. No, they’re curtains. There are little fittings for the rails. And this one’s got balls of wool and spools of thread. So I think all these will be cloth and sewing stuff. What’s the stack over there got?”

Laura tugged a fold of cardboard away. “Chess set. And a really old snakes and ladders board.”

“Okay, so that’s games – actually, yeah, the one next to it is Christmas decorations. Makes sense, that was the only time we ever got all the games out. So I bet you... this is all living room kind of things. Maybe the far end is kitchenware and cleaning bits?”

She picked her way down the rows. Laura followed, marvelling at the repository of decades worth of things never quite needed but never quite unneeded either. By the trap door from the landing there was a neat stack of new plastic boxes containing everything piled away seven years ago by helpful cleaners, but most of the space was occupied with more gradual accumulations in cardboard and wood.

“Whose is all this stuff?” Some of it looked very old indeed. A rocking horse in the corner was certainly more than a century old and - if horror films had taught her anything - probably possessed by vengeful spirits. It had that look about it. There were even a couple of clothes hangers suspended from nails hammered into rafters and displaying aproned outfits, the kind of things a pair of meek maids would wear in a period drama.

“Well, it’s my house and possession is nine-tenths.” Carmilla knelt and sorted through cardboard. “Things cut up for dusters. Closer.” She gave up in the attempt to move a heavy box for some reason placed on top of a stack and flicked her penknife open to slash through the side. “Porcelain. That ugly as fuck Wedgwood stuff.”

Rummage. “Spatulas.”

Cut. “Um… sock puppets?”

Tear. “How do we feel about bear spray?”

“Really?” Carmilla took the aerosol can from her hand and raised an eyebrow at the description. “Huh.”

“Boom! Success is mine!” Laura held up her triumph – a pile of metal pots and leather scraps covered in grime. _Silvo Silver Polish_ said the topmost can, along with a similar one for brass and one for wood.

“Knew it.” Carmilla straightened up as much as she could with the low ceilings. “You know, I think there’s even a sword up here somewhere. I saw it once.”

Laura’s eyes immediately lit up. “Can we-”

“How did I know you’d say that? All right, where did I see it?” She looked around, trying to summon up the memories of having wandered around here as a child whenever her father had things to add or remove from the cornucopia. “It all seemed a lot bigger back then of course. I think it was... yes, I remember I tried to ride the rocking horse and nearly smashed by head on one of the beams. And the sword was in that whole pile somewhere.” She took careful strides over a stack of yellowing prints and nudged some of the detritus with her foot.

“Watch it!” Laura grabbed her before she could knock her head into one of the hanging lightbulbs.

She knelt down and withdrew something from under a fraying greatcoat with a hole in it over the heart. “Well this isn’t a sword. But we’re close.” She handed the pistol to Laura who took it gingerly. It was wooden handled and with a flintlock mechanism, something from an earlier century. A bit of mother-of-pearl was inlaid into the handle. There was even fouling in the pan from it not having been cleaned after the last firing.

“Ah!” exclaimed Carmilla. She whirled the weapon around and handed it to Laura handle first.

Laura took the sword in place of the gun. It was slightly curved, a cavalry sabre with the disintegrated remains of a braid loop hanging from the handle. At some point it had been ill-used and there was a deep nick in the lower part of the blade. She ran her thumb over it and found it still quite sharp apart from that.

She struck a few dramatic poses and enjoyed Carmilla’s expression. “Where did it come from? Do you know?”

“I don’t. I asked my father when I found it – he took it out my hands very quickly as you might imagine – and he said he thought it was nineteenth century. Something for an officer. So it probably belonged to some ancestor of the previous owners, or of the ones before that. None of mine anyway, father only bought this place when I was born. Right.” She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Laura’s forehead. “Anything else you want to loot? Or shall we get our new shiny cleaned up?”

“Let’s clean it. But I’m keeping the sword with me. Girls with swords are hot, right?”

Carmilla had to agree.

The tarnish came off the chalice slowly, and Carmilla could be very distracting when she wanted to be, but Laura had it shining as if new within an hour. It was remarkably well preserved, with only a few subtle dints and hardly any noticeable nicks in the finish. The sides of the bowl, now that they were cleaned out and caught the light properly, were engraved with interlinked spirals rolling round and joining up with each other in endless knots.

“That’s old.” Laura turned it over in her hands and admired the glint of the light.

Rows of tabs were already open on Carmilla’s laptop. “Can we see a hallmark?” She turned the screen to show Laura what she meant. Laura turned the thing over, checking the base.

“Nope. Nothing. No maker’s mark. No stamps. What does that mean?”

“Either it wasn’t made in this country, or it was made illegally, or it was made before 1300.” She tapped keys. “Those patterns. Precision tools?”

“That’d be regular, right?” Laura dug up her magnifying glass pendant that she was finally getting some use out of. “I don’t think so. They’re not that smooth when you look at them. Dragged, you know? Like when you draw a circle freehand.”

“Figures. They came along 18th century or so. Etching compasses and that kind of thing.”

“When did people start using silver?”

Carmilla tapped keys. “Um… Neolithic it says here. But I can’t find pictures of anything like this good, so that’s way out – it could be medieval, but there’s no way to tell. Could just be foreign and more recent, that’d be more likely.”

“Could it be Roman?” Laura wondered.

Carmilla shrugged. “We’d have to get someone who knows what they’re talking about to say. But it wouldn’t look out of place with these.” She tapped the screen where two thousand year old chalices were displayed in ranks. “You know what I’m thinking, creampuff?”

“That there’s a spiral on the fountain?”

“Got it. I wonder if it was made to be here.”

* * *

“Where are we sleeping tonight?”

Karn shot her a glance. “Not in feather beds, sweetheart, that’s for sure.”

“I’m not- I mean, you don’t need to treat me like a child. I’ve been sleeping in the open for a while now.” Her voice sounded more petulant than she expected, which didn’t help.

“And still you latched on to me. How’s your journey going so far?”

Holly kicked at a passing tree root. “Well, I’ve been chased by dogs several times. I lost my spare boots in a bog that was somehow on top of a mountain. I think I met a wolf. I definitely almost got sold as a slave to a blond giant who didn’t speak a word of British. And my nice sleep in a warm barn last night was interrupted by a massacre. So forgive me if my love of solitude has grown thin.”

To her surprise Karn laughed softly. “Were you not sure about the wolf?”

“I honestly didn’t stay to check. How’s your journey?”

“Oh, you know. Not much different. But-” she stopped abruptly, cocked her head and raised a hand. “We need to get off the path, right now. No, over there.” A dozen yards from the thin track winding its way up this wooded slope was a jutting rock covered in chaotic undergrowth. She pulled Holly down behind it moments before the band of soldiers lumbered down the track.

“-and worse ale,” one of them was saying. Holly tried to lean over to catch a glance of how many there were but Karn wrenched her head back and pinched her as a reproof. “And not hair nor hide of the northern bastards.”

“And how many wars have you fought in, that you’re so keen to get fucked by some notherner?” growled another voice. “Hard tack and alive at the end is better than pork and a burial.”

“All I’m saying is if I’m getting buried anyway I’d like to do it after some pork,” said the first. “There was fuck-all to eat at the last three places. Least if we were with the king’s band we’d have food.”

“Food and sweating disease,” put in a third. “The camp’ll be reeking with sickness by now. He’s right, save I’m not so sure we’re out of it round here. You saw the smoke this morning. Can’t be our lot out scouting-”

“Why can’t it be-”

“Because we’re the fucking scouts, shit-for-brains. And it’s not the North, they’ve not left Uricon yet.”

“It’s war. It ain’t neat.” The voices were beginning to fade as the soldiers went further down the hill, but the big man’s growl was still loud. “Our lot, their lot, anyone looking to pick up the fucking mess once we’ve killed each other, and every lad with a spear seeing more promise in robbing than guarding. That’s the way it is, so spare me your squealing.”

They passed on. Karn held onto Holly’s arm for a minute more without a footstep heard and only then got up. She kept her hand on her axe haft as they continued.

“So that axe,” Holly ventured when the silent trudging had gone on a little too long. The hill was steep and the light was beginning to die. Somewhere above them, half seen through the trees, was a flock of starlings twisting in a circle and picking up new arrivals ready for the evening roost.

“What about it?”

“You use it a lot?”

Karn shot her a sidelong look. “Only on people who ask too many questions.”

She coloured. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Fine. Yes. I’ve killed seventeen men this year with it. Does that make you feel any better?”

Holly lost her step and stumbled. Karn’s sudden hand on the scruff of her neck hauling her upright again prevented her fall. “Seventeen?” she asked.

“Seventeen. This year.”

“Oh.”

They walked in silence for a while. The wood covering this side of the hill was losing its leaves and every time Holly looked up ahead there were a few falling slowly through the air. Karn didn’t stop to watch them. She trudged steadily through the fallen drifts and hollows of mud. She was quite small really, but it was easy to forget that and Holly found herself surprised every time they came level and were almost the same height.

“Did they deserve it?” she asked when she had got the courage back again.

“Oh, yes. They were all very bad people and I killed them in a noble cause and three different bishops absolved me. I’m pure of heart like that.” Her voice was flat and sarcastic. “Don’t fool yourself, honeycake. I’m not the hero of this story.”

“So why did you? You’re not going to kill me, are you?” Holly added with nervousness.

“You haven’t anything I want. Yet.” Karn let that sink in and then suddenly blocked her way. “Or maybe I’m just biding my time until you least expect an attack.” She leered and Holly was momentarily afraid before she caught the glint and started giggling.

“Give over.” She elbowed Karn out of the way and continued on her way up. The humour had been unexpected but it was a welcome change from surly silence.

Evening was properly falling by the time they reached the top and Karn declared that it was a good place to spend the night. There was undergrowth and cover, a good place to view the morning, and fresh water. The hill was oddly notched from this side and a little way down the other side was a half-ring of springs around the edge of the indent. Holly filled the waterskins while Karn found a sheltered place for a small fire. Her looted tinderbox was to her satisfaction.

They compared provisions. Holly had a handful of twice-baked bread, Karn a few strips of dried meat. Sharing didn’t make the rations stretch any further, but at least there was variety.

“There’s plenty of brooks down the other side,” she said. “And it’ll only take half a day’s walk to the next stop. We can catch trout tomorrow. I’ve a bit of net.”

“I can catch them without by tickling. Why’s it only half a day to the next stop?”

“Timing. Half a day gets up to Caer Caradoc, and that’s a good place to stop. But one day gets us to a bog in the middle of a valley which isn’t. And we need time to gather food more than we need speed. I hope there’s berries down there. It’s a bit late in the season but you never know.”

It was turning into a clear night and between the circle of trees where they had made their fire the stars were beginning to come out. Dark specks of bats flickered between them and once a trilling nightjar.

“What’s that?” Holly pointed to where the sky was barred with a rising column of thick smoke. It had not been there an hour ago.

Karn squinted. “Raid, probably. Reckon that’s a place to avoid tomorrow.” She concentrated. “That’ll make the river doubtful. We’ll not take the bridge, they’ll be watching.”

“Who will?”

“Whoever.”

The question had been nagging. “Karn, whose side are you on?”

“My own, sweetheart. I don’t give a damn about which man gets to be the biggest man. Got my own things to do, places to be.”

“But you’re meeting someone, right? Or going somewhere? You’ve got, what, a mission?”

She scowled and did not answer for a while. “I’m going to see my mother. That’s all. The rest of this isn’t something I’ve got a stake in.”

Holly stared out at the dusk where people she had never seen were dying where she could not see them and felt lost. “This island is broken. And there are soldiers everywhere and villages get burned and nobody seems to care.”

“That’s the way the world is, sweetheart.”

“Maybe it is. But I deserve better. Those people deserved better.” She paused. “You deserve better.”

Karn was quiet. After a few moments she took another draught of water to cover it but Holly saw she was watching her out of the corner of her eye. She watched back. It was more than the axe and the sharp tongue that made her formidable. Karn’s clothes were filthy and disrepaired even next to Holly’s. She dressed more like a man than a woman, with woollen trousers and a short tunic with a heavy belt to hang pouches from. Her hair almost didn’t need to be tied back, it was so matted and greasy. But in a certain light Holly could see how her sharp features could almost be beautiful under the grime.

“How’s the new cloak?”

Holly drew it closer around her shoulders. It had been a bit much earlier in the day and she hadn’t forgotten where it came from, but in the chilling night she was glad of it. It was warm and thick, and the size that was so unwieldy when walking was now a blessing.

“It’s good. Especially with winter coming on.” A thought struck her. “Have you got-”

“I’ve got enough, sweetheart.” She opened her bag and pulled out her own rolled pair of blankets in proof. A few bits and bobs spilled onto the ground and she hurried to stash them back inside.

“What’s that?” Karn flashed her eyes and tugged the bag closed, hiding the glint of something shiny in its depths. “All right, fine. Don’t tell me. You’re the one with the weapons. I was just curious.”

She stared at Holly’s face and softened. “It’s a cup, if you must know. A chalice. I’m just used to keeping it out of sight.”

Holly frowned. “A chalice? You robbed a church?”

“No. It’s not a church chalice. It’s for… anyway. It’s what I went to fetch, okay? And I’d rather not wave it about if it’s all the same to you.” She relented at Holly’s apologetic face. “All right, here’s the shiny thing.”

She drew it out of her bag and handed it over.

“Is that silver?”

Karn nodded. The chalice gleamed in the firelight. It was heavy, a solid piece of work. Holly ran her thumb over the engraved pattern on the outside of the bowl, rings of spirals looping over and over. She followed them round until she came back to where she began.

“You said you went to fetch this?”

“Yeah.” She offered no further explanation for a few moments, until Holly set it back on the ground in front of her. “My mother, it’s hers. But it was lost – stolen, actually – and I went to get it back. Had to kill a few people but I’m not losing sleep over their deaths.”

“Is it that important?”

Karn shrugged. “If you knew my mother, you wouldn’t ask. Maybe she’s just fond of it. Maybe it’s got some use to her. Honestly I didn’t ask.”

That seemed a very strange way to relate to one’s mother in Holly’s opinion, but Karn was a very strange person. “Is that why you’re so keen not to be seen by anyone?”

She made a sound in her throat. “That’s just for basic protection. There are a lot of soldiers about.”

“You look like you can handle yourself, though.”

“I didn’t say for my protection. But I’ve got it this far. Anyway. Get some rest, pretty girl. Tomorrow we’ve got more walking to do.”

Holly lay back and found herself falling asleep far quicker than she expected. One time she awoke, long after midnight. Karn was not beside her and for a moment she panicked until she spotted her at the edge of the wood. She was sitting on the stone ledge of the hill edge, leaning back and watching the stars turn above them. Holly watched her in turn until she got up and returned to the embers of the fire.

“What were you doing?” she whispered.

If Karn was surprised she had been seen she didn’t show it. “Looking at the stars,” she said. “As you saw. And listening. Get some sleep.”

* * *

Elle was sitting in the over-furnished dining room after breakfast, waiting for Mircalla to bring herself down. She was certainly awake – Elle had woken her up at length and with enthusiasm – but she did tend to doze afterwards and take her time over washing. Meanwhile there had been the promise of food downstairs and she had gotten impatient. Perry was certainly a woman who understood the importance of the meal. French toast, a mutton chop, bacon, tea and hot chocolate. Their maid at home in London was suitably discreet and sympathetic but sadly not possessed of the magic touch with eggs.

There was a stirring in the next room and the clunking of heavy things being put down. Natalie and Sarah-Jane were cleaning the fireplaces by the sounds of it, and in the middle of a good gossip as they went.

“You don’t think-” Natalie’s voice was shocked. She could not even bring herself to finish the sentence.

“I wouldn’t think it my business to suggest,” Sarah-Jane said, and then promptly showed this to be an atrocious falsehood. “But we’ve plenty of bedrooms and one was already made up for her friend just as good. And there they are crammed into one single room.” Despite the door between them, Elle flushed.

“We share a room,” objected Natalie.

“We have a bed each. And I’m sure neither of us would turn down a room of our own if it were offered. Not that it ever will be, even with those guest rooms going unslept in,” she added with a touch of acid.

“Wouldn’t be right, not on the same floor as the Mistress.”

“She’s not so high and mighty as she pretends. But that’s something else. What I’m saying is, you know how Miss Mircalla can behave when she’s a mind to it? Well I heard the Mistress say, I heard it right from her mouth when Mircalla went off to the city, _don’t you go taking liberties. That rebel streak of yours will be the death of you. Listen to Lady Belmonde, she’ll keep you on the straight and narrow._ Now what do you think she meant by that?”

“Is Lady Belmonde a religious woman, then?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say. But what I heard was – you remember General Spielsdorf who used to come stay and sometimes the Mistress and Mircalla would go to visit him? Well, his housekeeper’s daughter is a cousin of mine, sort of third cousin twice removed of my father, god rest his soul. And she wrote to me last year and said that his daughter Betty’s been sent away to a convent in Austria. Imagine! Well these foreign types have their odd ways – I know you won’t mind me saying that, Natalie – but his only daughter! And him with no sons. You know what that means.”

Natalie apparently did not know what that meant.

“Means she’s disgraced herself. Not marriageable anymore. He’s disinherited her. Well, don’t you see? Young Betty Spielsdorf sent off to be hidden away and Mircalla to the city out of Mistress’ sight. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Natalie thought. “You think... them?”

“Well, I wouldn’t like to say. You know I’m not one to poke my nose in others’ business. But Betty and Mircalla were always such firm friends and then there was that Callis girl- oh! Good morning, Miss!” The door from the hall into the parlour had opened.

“Morning Sarah-Jane,” said Mircalla’s. “Have you seen Elle this morning?”

“Was she not there when you woke up, Miss?” Sarah-Jane asked innocently.

“She’s more of a morning person than me. I suppose she’s already eaten all the breakfast.” She pushed the door into the dining room and Elle beamed to be discovered. Behind Mircalla’s shoulders, the eyes of Sarah-Jane and Natalie looked curiously over at her. Elle got up to shut the door behind them so she could kiss Mircalla again.

“I saved you breakfast.” She exhibited the second plate under its glass cover. “And then you need to take me exploring. I want to find all the nooks and crannies.”

The house was jumbled, almost overflowing. It was like a museum in which all the cabinets had been thrown out but all the exhibits kept. Tables and side-tables and curtained niches filled with pot plants somehow growing despite the dinge. Rugs on top of carpets, boxes on doilies, doilies on tables. The breakfast done, Elle threaded her way through a pair of Chinese vases with peacock feathers sticking out of them and wrinkled her nose.

“How did you not die, living here?”

Mircalla shrugged. “I did once fall into a box of blankets while playing one day and it took an hour until the maid found me and got me out. Maman likes to collect things. Antiques, silks, silver. People,” she added sourly and Elle shot her a look.

“Is that a sword?” She stood on tiptoe and lifted it off its wall hooks. It was a long flexible cavalry sabre, tied to its scabbard for safekeeping with faded and fraying yellow tassels.

“That’s my father’s. My late father’s.” Elle jerked to put it back, conscious that this might be different from the rest of the clutter, but Mircalla stopped her. She ran her finger along the blunted blade edge. “Not that he ever got much use out of it, I don’t think. More a soldier for the mess hall than the battlefield if Maman’s tales are any judge.”

“I’d like to be able to use a sword. When I was young I used to play with sticks and pretend to be Sir Elle, lady knight rescuing the princess from a dragon.”

Mircalla laughed. “I can imagine. And it was princesses you were rescuing even then, sweetheart?” Elle nodded, a little red. “I’m not sure there are any dragons around here, but if we find any you shall be the first to wield this sabre in defence of me.” She dropped a kiss on Elle’s cheek.

“And this?” Elle asked when the sword was back in its place. She tried to open a cupboard door but it was stuck or locked.

“The bad silverware.” Mircalla picked a walnut shell from out a porcelain bowl with a particularly nauseating design and broke it apart to reveal a little key inside. She fitted it into the lock. “Not the nice stuff for proper dinners or Maman’s fancy pieces, just battered old inherited bits.”

There was a jumble of black-tarnished spoons, no two of them apparently alike. A big ornamental plate with a great hole in the middle so that neither girl could see which king’s coronation it commemorated. There was also a large piece stacked on top of everything else.

“It’s a cup.” Elle tugged it out and found it heavy.

“It’s a chalice. Not sure where it’s from, actually. I think I’ve seen it before but-” she shrugged. “Things turn up sometimes, then they disappear again.”

She turned it over and inspected it. It was old, certainly, but unlike the rest of the battered and bruised stuff in the cupboard it was in good condition. Even the long stem was not bent. Around the bowl was looped a design of interlinked spirals. “I like it. Don’t you?”

Mircalla sighed theatrically. “I knew you only wanted me for my silverware. Fine, bash me on the head and run, cupcake.” Elle giggled and mimed robbery and theft with a blunt instrument. She placed the chalice back in its cabinet but made up her mind to remember it for a potential use.

She turned back. “I want you for a lot more than that.”

“Is that so?” Mircalla purred.

“Hmm.” She walked fingers along Mircalla’s arm and leaned in to kiss her. She drew back afterwards. “Do you think it was a mistake to bring me here?”

“What? Why?” Mircalla looked anxious all of a sudden. “Don’t you want to be? I thought we-”

“I want to be with you,” she said. “But is it safe? If you’d left me at home-”

“I could be stuck here for weeks, cupcake.”

“And then come home safely to me. But what if your mother-”

“It’ll be fine.” She hooked a finger into the neck of Elle’s dress and pulled her close. “We just have to be secret and quiet. No causing trouble.”

* * *

Laura typed in short bursts interspersed with lots of squinting into far corners of the room in the hope of inspiration. Her face bore an expression of agonised concentration. Carmilla brought the cocoa, placing it on the side table and twice nudging it away from her careless elbow.

“Fanfic?”

Laura grunted wordless agreement. Carmilla sat down beside her and watched as after extreme mental effort three more words were added to the imperceptibly growing story. One was then deleted as being an adverb too far. There were lots of gaps between the lines with bracketed descriptions of what was meant to go there but had not yet arrived.

“Where have we got to?”

“They’re not kissing yet.” A look of frustration passed across her face. “Those idiots. Those useless gays.”

Carmilla laughed. “I think they should kiss. In a very non-PG way.”

“Well, yes.” She picked up the cocoa and tried to flick the forming skin to the side of the mug. “That’s why I’m writing a thesis in fictional form explaining why this is the only possible resolution. They will make all the kisses and also save the world in the process.”

A couple of sentences jumped out of the page at Carmilla as she leaned over and rested her head on Laura’s shoulder. “Hang on, muskets? I thought you were doing that Hogwarts alternate universe?”

Laura shifted guiltily. “It’s in my works-in-progress folder. Along with the Victorian adventure one. And the… you know, the one with the, with the pink...” She coloured and shifted.

Carmilla grinned against her neck. “Oh, but I want you to finish that one. I’m so _very_ curious to find out what else you’ve got the imagination for.”

Laura squirmed and turned to the page for a distraction. She added a few more words and finished a paragraph. “There! Our hopelessly gay heroes have saved the day once more and bonded. There were heart eyes.” She saved the document with a look of satisfaction. “This one’s set in the Civil War. The Battle of Naseby is approaching.”

“Writing alternate universes confuses me.” Carmilla sat up straight and sipped her cocoa.

“What?”

“AUs confuse me. I don’t get how you write them. I mean,” she added hurriedly, “I love all your writing. Especially the one with the unmentionable pink thing that gets you stammering. But it might as well be magic how you go about doing it. And AUs most of all, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Laura turned on her with a look of smugness. “Miss Karnstein. Doctor Karnstein, I should say, and I emphasise _Doctor Karnstein PhD_ : you are confused by fanfiction?”

“Yeah, because… like, how? I mean I know that you do it creampuff, you do it all the time, it’s just the how I don’t get.” Carmilla pointed at a character’s name on the screen. “Wynonna. She’s the descendent of Wyatt Earp, yes? And you haven’t got a Wyatt Earp in 16-whatever. Hadn’t been born.”

“Easy!” Laura tapped some keys and brought up the opening paragraphs. “See, I’m keeping the demon angle because the Civil War had all of these odd religious groups who were obsessed with apocalypses and stuff. Only there’s a revolutionary thing too, so Wynonna’s the heir of Robin Hood and Peacemaker’s a musket whose handle was made from his longbow and barrel from his sword. And that’s good for extra tension because single-shot right?”

“Okay, but that’s so very different from canon-”

“No, it’s not! It’s only different if it’ll make the characters unrecognisable. The same dynamics can work. Now, if Wynnona was a sober-living Puritan that would be nonsense even if it were set in the real canon setting, right?”

“I guess.”

“I kind of think... you know, story and plot are different. Things can have different plots but the same story. You know how fairy tales have loads of different versions but they all sort of merge into one.”

* * *

The house settled in the night. The creaks from the other end of the attic as the maids readied themselves for bed had died down and now there were only the occasional noises of the beams swelling in the gentle but persistent rain. In Mircalla’s room there were still oil lamps burning their gentle light. Elle lay awake in Mircalla’s arms, trying not to giggle as the latter ran her thumb in a circle over a very particular place through her nightgown.

“I thought you wanted to have a sitting before we, hmm, retired properly,” she said, but without any conviction.

“Had to wait until everyone had gone to bed,” Mircalla said, the regular swirling of her thumb not deterred. “Had to be long and quiet and patient.” She demonstrated. “We’re not in London where everyone minds their own business.”

“Come on, let’s just do it. Otherwise you’re going to be half into ravishing me and then we won’t want to.” She pulled out of Mircalla’s grasp, eliciting a feeble protest over the loss of her prize, and went over to the case.

Mircalla rolled out of bed. “Nothing too overwhelming on the first night. Let’s just get the feel of the place. I’ve not been here since I first broke through, so who knows what might be on the other side.”

Elle laid out the paraphernalia. Not a great deal was needed for a sitting – a genuine sitting, that is. Frauds of course needed a whole armoury of tricks to fake a connection but in their case Mircalla would provide the connection herself and all that was truly necessary was some way to establish her in the correct mood and some means of communication. For tonight she laid a piece of paper on the side table and found a pencil. They had already brought a glass of water up when they went to bed and Elle made sure it was on the window ledge. She sat in one chair, Mircalla in the other.

"Where do you _get_ all this from, by the way?"

Elle looked embarassed. "Um... mostly leaflets published for a shilling each from the dodgy tobacconist with the back room I don't go into and which certainly doesn't smell of poppy-seed." She put her hands on her hips in justification. "Well, it works, doesn't it?"

She laughed. "I suppose so. Well, take it away."

Mircalla took two deep breaths and placed the pencil between her two open palms. The tip rested on the paper. Elle lit a candle and found a space for it on a nearby shelf. She blew out all the others in the further corners of the room so that there was only a single sphere of light and Mircalla’s hands were the centre of it.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Elle spread her hands and listened. For a few moments she did nothing more than that. Mircalla settled her own mind and opened her ears and other senses.

“Is there anybody there?” Elle asked the night.

Mircalla was silent. Elle had the way of it, she knew what words to speak. None of this had been possible before meeting her, although Elle had said too that she had never broken through before meeting Mircalla. Together seemed the only way to connect, and Elle’s part in it tonight was to speak to the spirits.

“Is there anybody there?” she repeated. “We come in greeting.”

Silence and stillness. It felt quieter, though, a different kind of quiet as if of somebody deliberately trying not to make a noise.

“Is there anybody there?” she repeated for a third time.

Between Mircalla’s gently closed palms she felt a little twitch. It could have been nothing more than the pencil settling down by another sixteenth of an inch, but she felt it. Her eyes met Elle’s and understanding passed between them.

“Greetings, visitor from beyond the veil. Will you tell us your name?”

This was always the most difficult part, distinguishing between the subtle forces moving her hands and her own wishes and fears. Mircalla had to remain tense enough to hold the pencil without pushing in one way or another, without letting her mind race ahead and try to complete the words she guessed would appear. She forced herself to not look at the paper and concentrated on Elle instead. That little shadow at the base of her neck.

Elle leaned forward. There were no words yet, but something was forming.

“C,” she said. “Is that your name? Does it begin with a C?”

At once Mircalla gasped and stiffened. She felt hairs beginning to stand up on her arms and a tense prickly feeling run through her. It was like the tenderness of limbs following a bout of influenza, or the knowledge that somebody was right behind her, or the feeling of kisses stirring her flesh. Her hands jerked with the sudden pressure of emotion.

Elle frowned. “I’m sorry, gentle visitor. That was rude. I can see now that this is no letter.” She spread her hands. “Do not be offended. If you would rather draw, you are most welcome.”

On the paper, the spiral grew. Mircalla felt able to drop her eyes to watch it. She was sinking rapidly into the receptive state and she could watch her hands now as if they were no part of her. It moved itself with no effort from her. She found her body at once distant and so close, everything happening so far of as to be no concern of hers and yet so close that every prickle on her skin occupied her attention.

“Can I ask what binds you to this place?” Elle ventured when Mircalla seemed calmer and the spiral had been drawn. “You may speak through Mircalla if you will.”

There was a pause and then quick as a flash Mircalla seized the pencil in one fist and drove it point down into the table. The crack resounded through the sleeping house and the lead splintered.

Ell watched the fist clutching its broken stub of pencil and listened to her heart hammering in her ears. The tendons in Mircalla’s hand had not relaxed. She chanced a glance at her lover’s face. It was distant, foggy. She looked far away, responding to the other side.

“’Calla?”

“I’m here. Don’t worry.”

“Where are you?”

“With her.”

“Her?”

“With her.” Smoothly, gradually, she stretched her arms up and then back. They folded behind the back of her chair and she arched her back, tensing against it.

“All right.” Elle unclenched her fists and tried to relax her breathing. This could be scary sometimes, but all it took to snap Mircalla out of things was a word or a snap of the fingers or at worst a dash of water to her face. The important thing to remember was that the spirit couldn’t hurt anyone. She was like the images thrown from a magic lantern and nothing more. “Have you a message for us?”

“She’s coming.”

“She’s coming?” Elle hoped Mircalla would have her eyes open so that she could gauge how that ominous message had felt coming through, but ‘Calla was swaying slowly like a tree in a gentle breeze or someone about to fall asleep. Her eyes were closed.

“She was always coming. But now she’s close.”

“When will she arrive?” it was quite likely that the answer to this would be nonsense. The two had discovered quite early in their spiritualist experiments that for the most part the spirits of the departed were less knowledgeable than some famous mediums liked to claim. For the most part they were wrapped up with affairs long since forgotten or completed.

Mircalla suddenly bent forward. Her eyes opened and Elle saw how far away she was. Her hand clutched the neck of her nightgown. “Wrong question,” she said.

Ell eyed the glass of water on the window ledge. “Why?” she breathed.

“She’s already here,” the visitor said through Mircalla’s voice. “Hold on, sweetheart.”

Ell started and threw the water. She didn’t even both with the pinch. Mircalla cried out and immediately stifled herself. Their eyes met and she raised her eyebrows.

“That was… unusual,” she said and it was her ordinary voice.

“Yeah.” Elle looked spooked to her and Mircalla was afraid for a moment that the words had got deeper under her skin, but then they were replaced by her slow grin of enthusiasm. “We’ve got investigating to do, ‘Calla.”

Mircalla nodded and dried her face off on the bedclothes. Her nightdress was soaked and, with a raised eyebrow at Elle, she slipped out of it and waited for her to follow her to bed.

“What did she feel like?” Elle asked when they were bundled together in the blankets and the world had shrunk to the sixpenny width of breath between them.

“Like she wasn’t one thing. She kept shifting. Kept changing. I tried to hold her together but I couldn’t do it.”

* * *

“There’s nobody there.”

“That’s the point.” Karn gestured left and right down the wide valley. “This is a place for cattle and horses. Where are they? You see the village?”

It was not crossing the river itself that was difficult, Holly understood. The Corve was a small thing and could be waded by anyone willing to get wet. The problem was that it marked the western edge of a wide low vale, entirely flat and almost treeless, but cut through by many brooks and ditches. Good grazing and meadow land – and anyone on it would be visible to watchers for miles around with no cover. From the little wooded hill above a brook they stood on, to the Corve itself on the far side under the next wooded ridge and safety, was about two miles. There was a good path going almost straight across to a little village with a handy bridge and Karn had forbidden it. She had sat on a tuffet and stared at the surrounding hilltops for what seemed like an age before pronouncing that there was nobody watching from the old fort on the eastern horizon, but something was moving on Mytton and she didn’t know what.

“We saw smoke here last night,” she reminded Holly. “And there’s not a lot of life today. We won’t take the bridge. We should go the long way round and wade the river. Go up the other side and then cut back onto our way.”

“What is the long way round?” The valley looked very long indeed and the hills behind it were mounded up in a solemn line.

Karn shrugged. “You know, I may have said that without much of a real plan.”

“How about the brook?”

“You really want to do two miles up to your calves in cold water?”

“Well, no. But the banks are a couple of feet high and we’re not that tall.” Karn glared at her and she beamed back. “They’re the only place with bushes and trees. We can take off our boots and go down in the stream as it crosses the valley. It joins the river on the other side, doesn’t it? Then all we need to do it put our nice dry boots back on and get up the hills. If anyone we want to hide from comes along we’re already in a ditch and surrounded by cover.”

“And if anyone we want to hide from finds us, we’re freezing cold and without any boots. And in a ditch.” She drummed her fingers on the handle of her axe. “All right. But only because I have nothing resembling a better plan.”

They got ready. For once Holly was better prepared than Karn. Once her boots and hose were off and hanging from her belt she had only to hitch her skirts up so they were above her knees. Her big green cloak she tucked into her belt with it. Karn was dressed more like a man with thick trousers under her knee-length tunic and she needed to sit down and struggle them off. There was a flock of crows circling over something further up the valley by the time she finished and she eyed it.

“Let’s get moving,” she muttered. “If you step on a stickleback, try not to scream.”

“What if I step on a minnow?”

“Then you have to ask it not to scream on our account. After you, sweetheart.”

The water was shockingly cold but there wasn’t much mud on the bottom. It formed a thin blanket over cobbles and soft gravel and after the initial chill going was easy enough. Holly tramped through it and Karn followed after. The bank did not even reach waist high, but there were occasional stumps and bushes along the banks that stood up more or less as far as their heads and as cover went in this flat land it was hard to better. Here and there were beaches tramped into the brook by herds of cattle come down to drink, but wherever the cattle were was not here. They came upon a disgruntled heron in one such place, and he flapped lazily away with a reproachful call.

“You’re from the east, right?” Karn asked after a while.

“Yes. How did you guess?”

“You don’t mind getting wet. But I thought you marsh creatures were supposed to have webbed feet.”

Holly looked back and was met with a satisfied smirk. “All right, where are you from then?”

“Well I have to keep some secrets, don’t I? Else I’ll lose my air of mystery.”

Holly sighed. But there was a different quality to Karn’s silences after a couple of days travelling together. Her refusals to talk about herself were lighter and less grumpy.

“You know, wealthy women in Rome shave their legs.”

It was such an unexpected comment, especially coming from Karn that Holly stopped walking entirely and looked back. “What?”

“It’s true!”

“Right. Firstly, how do they not cut them to shreds and secondly how do you know that? And thirdly why did that come to mind right now?”

Karn laughed and squeezed past her with a pat on the back to take the lead. Her bare legs splashed through the water. “I’ve spent time in Rome. It’s beautiful there, it really is. The buildings like you wouldn’t believe, with mosaics and painting and beautiful stone. Even the ruined places are lovely. And while I was there I made the intimate acquaintance of a few wealthy and beautiful women.”

Holly gaped after her. Karn was travel-stained and filthy, in rough patched clothes that wouldn’t look out of place on a soldier. There were cuts and bruises and scrapes and mud over every visible inch of skin. The idea of her in a great stone city making up to rich women was weird enough. And come to that-

“Intimate acquaintance?” she asked and got a hum of self-satisfied agreement in reply. “Do you- I mean, did you- I mean, are you-”

“Their slaves do it,” Karn said, ignoring the questions. “With very sharp razors and a lot of oil and patience. They don’t have a lot else to be doing with their time. Rich and boring husbands, you know.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been beyond the sea.” She considered and chanced a confidence. “And I’m not sure I want to know about any husbands, rich or not.” Karn looked back and there was something like a conspiratorial smile on her face.

“I’m with you th- What’s that?” She froze in the middle of the stream and cast around. “Quiet.” She motioned Holly not to say what she was about to. They stood completely still and listened to the sounds of the day. Slow running of water. Wind in the grass and bushes. And somewhere, not close but not far off either, singing.

“Men?” Holly mouthed. Karn nodded. “Soldiers?” She shrugged.

Karn motioned Holly to crouch down. She herself found a stump of a chopped willow and drew herself from the brook behind it. She peered out across the meadows and hugged the trunk as she moved. Carefully she came down again into the stream.

“Horsemen. At least two of them. They haven’t seen us, but they’re passing this way. Don’t worry,” she said to Holly’s panicked face, “it’ll be fine. Just, just do what I say. Get down low and go up to the place on the right with the stand of alders.”

“What about you?”

“Room for one. I’ll take the hollow with the sedges. If one of us gets seen the other might need a distraction. Move.”

She crouched down almost double and tried to hurry through the stream without making noise. Karn didn’t follow and Holly didn’t look back until she’d found the alder stand and pushed herself in amongst the tangle of bare twigs and trunks no thicker than her wrist. She hugged her green cloak around her and hoped it would at least fool casual glances.

Across the stream she saw Karn quickly taking everything that looked unusual on her – her axe, her big studded belt, her travelling bag – and throwing them into a dip in the ground. She found a matted mass of greenery sculling in a shallow to cover it with and by the time the two horsemen came singing into sight she could have been any young woman in the world – out of casual sight but not obviously trying to avoid attention.

The riders were not moving fast, but they weren’t dallying either. They were singing something repetitive and rhythmic, the kind of thing that soldiers sang on long marches. They almost didn’t see Karn until they’d ridden past her, but when they did they stopped.

There were two. One looked uninterested at this dark-haired girl, but the second leaned down to say a few words to her, his feet hanging loose in long boots as he held on to the horns of the saddle. Karn said something in response. He gestured to the south. She shrugged. His companion tried to interrupt him, but he waved it off.

Karn’s body language shifted. She surreptitiously moved a little closer to her hidden cache with the axe. The rider advanced on her. If he were walking it would be a swagger. There was a grin on his face and not a pleasant one. Karn was tensing. She glanced at the second rider and although he appeared uninterested in joining his friend he wasn’t stopping him either.

Holly groped around at her feet and turned up a pair of stones. She aimed, then thought better. She aimed lower and flung the first at her target.

The stone hit the first man’s horse on the hindquarters and it started. It bucked its head, shifted its feet and then Holly’s second stone smacked it in the eye. That was enough. It reared up, ignoring the shouting from the two riders and threw itself into a panicked gallop. The rider was skilled enough to stay in place between the horns of the saddle, but he couldn’t control it and keep properly on top of the horse at the same time. It carried him off and his companion cast one suspicious look at Karn and around the stream before shrugging, throwing her an offhand salute and spurring his own mount to chase after his companion.

They wasted no time. Karn gathered her stuff up, and Holly grabbed anything that needed time to pack away again. They abandoned the stream and ran across the pastures. The riders didn’t come back. The river, when they finally reached it, hardly slowed them down. Karn simply threw her baggage across and was already pulling her boots on at the other side when Holly joined her. The hills were ahead and covered in trees. They pushed forward.

“That was quick thinking,” Karn said when the urgency had slowed and the valley was behind them. “Um. Thank you.” She gave the gratitude awkwardly but not grudgingly, as if it were given freely but by someone out of practice.

“What were they saying?”

“The usual. Wasn’t I a pretty girl and why was I alone out here and wasn’t I afraid the nasty southern barbarians might catch me? And had I seen any of the bands who are pillaging this bit of the world.”

“Oh. I thought it was worse than that.”

“It was going to get worse, trust me. That first one was just getting started on ‘we’ll just stick around and look after you, maybe take you with us to be sure’. That would have been axe time, but I didn’t fancy my chances against men on horseback. You need a spear for that and even then you want to be killing one at a time. We know one thing though.”

“What?”

“They were scouts. They were almost as keen to find out if I’d seen other soldiers as to find out if I’d put up a fight. There’s an army coming down from the north.”

* * *

Mircalla stirred in sleeplessness. Elle was fast asleep, lulled by the gentle patter of light rain on the windows, but she was still unsettled. Wilson had driven down to Craven Arms early in the afternoon to pick up her mother and still had not returned by the time everyone had finally given up waiting and drifted off to bed. Perry had fretted but eventually decided that if anything catastrophic had happened they would be receiving visitors for the police force – more likely, then, Lilita had simply been delayed and Wilson was waiting out her late arrival in the tap room of the Craven Arms Hotel.

It was so like her mother to put her to this unease. Mircalla had had everything prepared for the expected meeting – a little speech about her journey and how efficient Elle had been in double-checking railway tickets; a bit of name-dropping about how Lady Belmonde was so jealous because she’d heard of Shropshire’s beauty; a touch of reinforcement of the suitability of having a lady’s companion chastely sharing one’s room. Lilita was not easily managed but Mircalla had had plenty of practice. As it was, however, there was a distinct possibility that her carefully planned setting of the agenda would not be delivered as anticipated and that left the mood of her mother entirely up to chance.

The room was pitch black. There was no moon and nothing outside to shine through the curtains and pick out the lovely shape of Elle lying next to her. Back in London, the apartment they shared by Hyde Park was never quite dark. Always there were street lights and the glow of other houses to let a little light in between the curtains. It had been the best year of Mircalla’s life – far away from mothers and distant relations and entirely lacking in dull neighbours with nothing better to do than poke their noses into other people’s business. Never had she been so free. Somehow the presence of millions of people in one city allowed a hiddenness that the country never did. In some village in the middle of nowhere nothing was secret, it was all sniffed out and put a stop to before it had even begun.

And the new world that was breeding in the city! She had gone down to stay with Lady Belmonde as part of some social-climbing plan of her mother’s and within a week had determined to stay and find a place to live. The restaurants, the theatres, the art galleries and all of it was infinitely better when it was there for her to explore at her own will rather than on the end of some educational leash. And so she had met Elle and, with a certain amount of understanding help from contacts provided by Lady Belmonde, her new life had begun.

Back here in her own bed, it was unpleasantly close to feeling like she had just gone round in a circle and come back to where she had started. And with such fears worrying at the edge of her consciousness, Mircalla finally drifted into sleep.

In her dream there were faces standing over her bed and she knew they were the ghosts of the house and the hill. She was not scared, but nor was she at ease. It was like sitting in a railway carriage and looking at the ranks of people who were all unfamiliar and yet all companions because they were all going the same way. There were lots of them and she could not see where the press of bodiless forms ended. She stood up and they gave way before her. Her feet touched the carpet and Elle stirred in the bed behind her, but in the dream she had no care for this.

The ghosts stood to either side of the corridor, like statues along an avenue. She passed them by. When she came to the two guest rooms at the top of the stairs, she found one door was open and she looked in to see the sleeping women wrapped in each others arms in the bed. A chalice stood on their nightstand. They looked happy. She brushed the hair from their faces and they smiled. Down the stairs she went and the front door had been opened for her. There were boxes stacked by the door and for a moment that seemed puzzling but she went on, following the ghosts.

Out on the hillside she could see the countryside lit up. It was still night and she knew there was no source of light save for a lantern burning for some reason on the front step, but she could see perfectly nonetheless. Everything was grey but clear. All over the hillside were the ghosts: sitting, standing, watching. On the horizon one pair was marching, coming closer. The place was like a graveyard and she remembered the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of years there had been people in this land.

* * *

Elle pulled herself out of bed. She had woken up without Mircalla beside her and after waiting for her to return from the kitchen or wherever, realised she had been gone for some time. It was still dark, some time after midnight, but there were sounds from downstairs and some hints of candlelight coming through the open bedroom door. She stepped cautiously out into the corridor.

“’Calla?” she whispered. There was no reply. Some of the doors in the corridor were open but the source of light was definitely downstairs. She descended.

The front door was open and there was a lamp balanced on a pile of boxes and suitcases by the door. From somewhere at the back of the house came movement.

“Miss?”

Ell nearly jumped out of her skin. “Wilson! You scared me. Are you-”

“Madam Lilita arrived at last. A tree came fell on the line down Hereford way and the train was out of action for hours. I’m still unpacking. What are you doing up at this hour?”

“Where’s Mircalla?”

“Isn’t she in her room?” he asked, but Elle shook her head. “She’s not...”

“Not upstairs.”

“I was just in the kitchen. Madam’s in the drawing room.” He bit his lip.

A gust of wind blew in the open door and a thought hit Elle along with it. She stepped over the threshold out into the muddy, rain-spattered yard. “Wilson. Pass me the lamp.” The darkness around was absolute and she went slowly. Rain soaked her hair. Her feet sunk into the mud and sharp stones pressed into the soles of her feet. Moving by the small circle of light she came to the lip of the bowl that held Silas House and leaned out over the hillside.

Behind her a beam shot out. Wilson lifted in two hands one of the huge heavy lamps fixed to the front of his carriage. A strong flame, almost blue, was burning with mirrors behind it and a lens in front. He shot a searchlight over the hillside. Grass, heather, crabbed hawthorns and gorse stood out weirdly and flat in the circle of light.

“There! No, go back. There, see!” A patch of white, fluttering. She must be drenched and freezing in only her nightdress, Elle thought. She spared only a moment to run back inside and grab her green coat from the stand before hurrying on and leaving Wilson on the lip. “Stay there! Keep the light forward.”

She wasn’t far off, only a hundred yards or so, but in the windy night it seemed a very long way down. Elle slipped on the wet grass and once on a thistle but she kept going as fast as she dared and called Mircalla’s name.

She did not respond to Elle’s calls, only walked on. Her steps were slow and gentle but incautious. She did not flinch from the sharpness of underfoot as Elle did. Her eyes were open but her face expressionless. She was asleep.

“’Calla.” Elle hesitated before placing a hand on her shoulder. “Mircalla.”

She neither slowed nor paused. Her eyes were straight ahead, looking down to the unseen bottom of the hill.

“’Calla, wake up!” Elle shook her by the shoulder. “Damn it. Sorry about this, my love.”

The slap sounded a lot worse than intended, but it had the desired effect. Mircalla wobbled, her knees almost giving way. Her eyes lost their far away gaze and she squinted into the light of the lamp.

“Elle? Cupcake? What the- what the frilly-”

“You were sleepwalking. Hey, I’ve got you.” She kept Mircalla upright as she wavered. “You were away with the fairies there. What did you think you were doing?”

Mircalla’s face was confused, disoriented. “I was walking round. I was almost there.”

“Well. All right then. Come on, let’s get you up the hill again. You must be freezing in your nightgown.” She was soaked through, the fabric lank and heavy. Now that she was back in the world of the living she was starting to shake and goosepimples showed on her arms. Elle put her coat around her shoulders.

At the top of the hill there were now two figures. Wilson holding the lamp to guide them home and a woman pursing her lips, damp red hair tangled around her shoulders. Mircalla jerked in Elle’s arms when she saw her.

“Mircalla.”

“Mother.”

“I come home and this is what I find? What on earth were you thinking?” She did not wait for an answer. “Have you any idea what could have happened? And you,” she turned to Elle who flinched, “did you know my daughter suffered from this… affliction? I believe you are the one she described as her ‘companion’.” The sneer was obvious.

Elle shook her head mutely.

“Maman, I’m sorry-”

“Yes yes, but that’s not the slightest good to anyone. I suppose we must be grateful you didn’t do this in town and shame us all. What possessed you?” Mircalla just shrugged. “Hmm. Away with the fairies. My sister used to say that about you and she was right. All right, take her inside. I shall have things to say in the morning. I’m too tired right now.” She turned tail and Wilson hurried to follow behind. Mircalla and Elle followed slower.

Inside the hallway and spared at last from more rain, Lilita turned again to face them. Wilson scurried off to make busy somewhere else.

“I think you should sleep with somebody else in the room, Mircalla. We can’t have more of this. If you have tendencies towards weaknesses of this sort, you’ll need to be watched. We can’t let you slip out of our grasp. I’ll wake Perry.”

“I-” Mircalla found it difficult to speak with her chattering teeth. Elle tucked her green coat around her as best she could but it was more for the feeling of support than warmth. She needed dry clothes. “I mean Elle is, is, sh, sharing my room. Already. Don’t need anyone else.” She tried to stare defiantly at her mother.

Lilita’s expression was unreadable. She looked very carefully and calmly into Elle’s eyes for far longer than was comfortable. “I see,” she said eventually. “And I see there is much you have concealed in your letters.” She sighed. “This is another thing I will take you in hand over now that you are back. But that’s best done in the morning when you’re more inclined to be rational. Just… just go to bed now.”

Elle hurried Mircalla upstairs and locked the door behind them. Mircalla said nothing, only shivering as Elle got her out of her wet nightgown and dried her off. Only when dressed again and wrapped in the warm of their bed did she manage to say anything.

“She knows. Elle, she knows about us. We’re lost.”

Elle tightened her grip on her still chilly body. “It’s all right. I won’t let her take you away from me.”

“Hold me.”

“It’s why I’m here.”

* * *

They trudged upwards. The hills were growing higher as they marched west and every time they reached the summit of one, the path started down again and Holly saw the next hill looming up even more as they gave up their height. This one felt different, like the border of something. It was steeper, wider, sliced into from all directions by deep angled cuts. They followed one of the sharp stream valleys, clinging to the stony sides as it wound upwards. The Long Mountain, Karn had called it.

The sky was not dim yet, but the afternoon had pushed on and already there were hard-edged shadows thrown by the scarps and bluffs that flanked this tight hollow. “Tomorrow’s the third day since we met,” Holly said out loud after mulling over it for a few moments.

“So it is.”

“So what happens then?”

“Top of this, we see the hill I’m headed for and then I’ll show you how to get to Caer Isca. It’s a few days more for you but we’re past the bad parts.”

“How do you know?”

“That was the road back there.” They had crossed a road before starting the way up the Long Mountain – a real Roman road, with wide stone flags and grass growing in the cracks. Karn had hurried them across it as fast as she could. “The last good road before Cambria. Any spearmen down from Uricon will use that if they’re for Glevum and not get messed in this heather or the bog beyond. And the same for those going north. We’re out of the war, Holly.”

It was the first time she had used Holly’s name and there was even a bit of a smile on her face when she looked back. “Thank you, Karn. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Don’t go expecting heroic shit from me, sweetheart.” But the smile was a bit more. “What will you do when you get somewhere good?”

“I don’t know. Suppose I’ll have to find work. I’m good at crafts.” Karn affected surprise. “It’s true! I used to make dolls out of my mother’s leftover wool. I can read a little bit, too.”

She looked impressed. “Really? Me too. British or Latin?”

“British only. Father taught me. He said it was more usual where he was from. I’ve never read an actual book, though. Have you?”

“Yes, a good few. In Latin mostly, and some in Greek.” She said something out loud in what Holly guessed must be Greek.

“That’s pretty amazing. I always hoped-”

All at once Karn flung Holly against the hillside and pressed herself down next to her. She hissed for silence at Holly’s protest.

“Why-”

“Shut up. Shut up. There’s someone.”

Holly saw nothing, could hear nothing except the drowsy hum of insects in the heather and furze. There were corners and lumps of stone poking into her and she wanted to shift position but restrained herself and tried to imitate Karn. The woman was so still, she was like a cat frozen in mid-stalk. Holly watched the pulse in her throat barely two inches away. It was calm and unhurried, quite unlike her own racing heart which Karn could probably hear hammering away.

“Stay here,” Karn breathed. She did not stand up straight away. Rather she half-slid, half scuttled to a hawthorn growing bowed over the rocky stream and hugged herself to it. She glanced back to make sure Holly was still stuck to the outcrop and gave a blank smile. She held up a hand. Wait, her lips mouthed.

She crept four-legged, almost hugging the banks of the stream where bushes were thickest. Holly craned her neck. She had still seen nothing and heard nobody.

A shout rang out and then an answer. Men’s voices. She kept still.

Karn came running back, stooped double to keep her profile low but not wasting any time. “We’re trapped,” she said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Trapped?”

“They’re coming down the valley. Five of them and they’re armed. Led by a huge man with tattoos on his arms. From the mountains, I think – they’re brigands, not soldiers.”

“Can we-”

“They’ll see us if we’re on the path. And these are not nice people, Holly. Fuck, we should have gone round the long way.”

Fear settled into Holly’s belly. She took in the valley, a few crabbed trees studded along the stream and some rocky outcrops that might hide someone from those far away but which would do nothing if the men were coming down past them. The sharp slopes were too steep to climb except by hands and feet and they were bare of cover.

“We need to kill them. That’s the only way. Now, they’re strung out on the path. If I’m quick I can kill them one by one, but we’re dead if they all come at once.” Karn took a breath. “Give me your arm and don’t scream.”

Holly swallowed and offered her arm. Karn held it and pulled out a knife. Before Holly could pull away she dug the point into the flesh just above the wrist until the blood came. Holly almost shrieked but Karn’s grip on her was strong.

“Hush, you’re not dead.”

“But-”

“I need the strength. Now shut up.” She stuffed her knife away again and wiped her fingers in Holly’s blood. Quickly she dabbed her bloody fingertips on her own forehead – three red dots on the pale skin. She wet her fingers again and made lines on her cheeks, wet them again and dropped a stroke from her lower lip down her chin. Finally she scooped as much as she could and licked it off. Her tongue flicked red until she hid it and gritted her teeth.

She fell silent and sank to her knees. Breathed out. Holly held her stabbed wrist in her other hand and stared.

“Karn?”

Her eyes when she raised them were distant. They did not focus on Holly’s face but through her, looking somewhere else. She was suddenly breathing as if she’d been running. Holly clapped a hand on her neck to stop the shaking and the pulse was racing, feverish quick.

“Karn?”

A force took her. She slammed her hand forward and seized Holly’s shoulder. Her fingers dug in, hard and painful. She squeezed and Holly yelped from the hurt. The teeth in her rictus grin were stained red and she hissed death.

Her hand started to find its way to her axe haft. Holly tore her gaze away from it and from Kar’s twitching eyelids to the head of the first man coming round the corner. He stopped when he saw the women.

“Him! Him there!” Holly shouted in panic and Karn responded. She twisted round, saw him and launched herself forward from the outcrop. She flipped the axe off her belt and the man flinched. He had barely time to draw his own sword before she was on him. She struck, he fended off, she struck back quicker and he was on his knees screaming. Her axe bit into his neck in a spray of blood.

It was over so quickly. Karn kicked his body to lie over on its back and to Holly’s horror wiped her palm over her bloody axehead and then ran it ecstatically over her face so that she was covered red. She looked back, inhumanly curious like a wild animal, at Holly lying there in terror.

“More!” Holly shouted in desperation. “More further on!”

The command put tension into her arms again. She snapped round. Keening fury at the sky, Karn tore onwards through the heather to bring down death.

Holly scrambled up. Karn was disappearing round the corner, sprinting far faster than she could. Beyond the turn of the path there was shouting, the clash of weapons, Karn screaming battle fury and the cries of men. Holly pushed away the urge to throw up and jumped over the butchered body of the first man. She turned the corner and stopped.

The bodies already lay all about. One was in the stream and the last three to die were slaughtered in a single heap and Karn knelt beside them with her axe on the ground and her fists bunched. Blood was spilling all over the ground. None of them had died cleanly, but they had all died quickly. The veins in Karn’s neck stood out, the dead men’s blood splashed over her face and mixing with Holly’s. Her body was stiff, frozen, still full of battle rage but without anywhere to send it. Holly approached as quiet and slow as if she were following a hare.

Karn heard her and raised her head. The eyes held hate but she remained still. An eyelid twitched.

“Karn? Hey, Karn?”

There was a wordless growl coming from between her gritted teeth. Her right hand groped on the ground for the axe. Her left scooped a handful of blood from the broken throat of one fallen man and made to drink it.

“No!” Alarm shot into Holly’s voice but the sudden volume only disturbed Karn more. She grasped the axe handle and half rose. Fury in her eyes and she did not know her. “Karn, it’s just me. It’s Holly. It’s just me.” She twisted the brooch holding her green cloak and held the cloth out.

“Not her?”

Holly didn’t understand, but she shook her head.

“Not her? She’s gone, the other. Me? Is it me?”

Her words made no sense. “Yes. Yes, Karn, it’s you. Here.” She reached her and, trying not to look at the axe with its bloodied blade, draped the cloak around Karn’s shoulders. Her arms found her and held on.

Karn’s hands came up, both empty. She touched Holly’s and was no longer frozen. She shivered as in great cold.

“Her face. Looking down on me. She’s caught.”

“Caught?”

“Caught, yes, trapped. She sees. She sees she’s caught. I’ve been her before. Happen I know her. It’s from being badly. She has her and she won’t let go-”

Her words were losing form and the shaking came on strong. Her shoulders so strong were heaving and Holly held on. She warped. Everything twisting. She had no form in Holly’s arms and the cloak shivered like shapeless water but Holly held.

At last she was Karn again. She shivered, but like she was cold and no more. She lay with eyes closed and arms pressed tight into her chest and there were tears. The strength was all gone from her and left nothing in its wake. Despite the stink of the blood and the chill of the wind and the sickness of death all about her, Holly lay down beside Karn and wrapped her in her arms.

“Hold me.”

“It’s why I’m here.”

* * *

There was a great pile of old books on the dining room table and Carmilla was already one third of the way through them. She had plundered the library at Church Stretton for everything relating to local archaeology and nearly given the poor librarian an asthma attack by insisting on several trips down to the stacks. Her haul consisted of a few bright photo-filled modern volumes, a larger collection of dry academic tomes from the previous century and several pieces from even further back with antiquated spelling. It was bliss.

Laura was still tapping away at her laptop over in the living room and the accelerating pace of the story suggested the long-awaited big confession of love was probably drawing closer and closer. Carmilla took another swallow of tea and turned a page. Specificity was what she was seeking. The glossy books of photos and artists reconstructions were all very well but there was something very nice in tracking down the minute details and pinpointing exact locations. The chalice was placed right before her as a reminder of her goal.

Probably it was a little bit of vanity. She could have just handed it in to a museum and let them deal with it. At the very least she should – legally speaking – have given it to the actual owner of Silas Wood. But the wood was named for the hill and her house was named for the hill and her Laura had found it so it was hers now. Besides, research gave the day shape and kept the little grey cells ticking along.

There was a lot to deal with. There was an ancient hillfort on an adjoining hill and plenty of truly ancient archaeological sites in the surrounding countryside. That certainly pushed the theoretical maximum back a long way. There had definitely been a phase of occupation in the early middle ages, possibly pushing back into the later Roman era. One authority suggested that the fountain was originally a Roman construction, although they noted in their ponderous paper that this did not decisively prove the age of the carving. Their argument hinged on the carbon dating of certain bones said to have been found in it during the nineteenth century – but of course those had been gathering dust in a mislabelled museum box for over a century soaked in moth repellent before the dating technology had come along, so who knew really?

It was an interesting possibility. Some local bigwig called Vordenberg had tried to go digging in 1871 but found nothing more interesting than a few rusty concretions that might once have been metal tools. The skeleton couldn’t have been turned up then else he would have written about it in his book. It was the most boring book Carmilla had ever read and constantly going on excursions to hide the fact he had nothing worthwhile to say about local history. But maybe he knew about previous excavations and that was what suggested to him something worth digging for? So did that suggest that the chalice might belong to the same era?

She made a note of this possibility.

The Vordenberg family (if indeed there was anyone save the distant and dusty C.H.A.Vordenberg) seemed to have disappeared from the record in 1872, shortly after his book was published. The house over near Shelve had been bought by the Earl of Craven at auction early the next year with all its attendant lands, which rather suggested a death without heirs. She hadn’t been able to find a record of who owned Silas House at the time – Carmilla’s own family had only bought it the year of her birth.

“Oh, shit!” The mug went tumbling over the table and only a hasty bit of scrambling rescued the library books from lasting harm.

“Carm?”

“It’s fine!” she called back to Laura. “Spilled the tea. Damn it, I like this top.”

“Looks good on you, but better lying on our bedroom floor,” she called back. Carmilla rolled her eyes and traipsed upstairs to change.

She inspected herself in the mirror in their room. It was just her top covered in tea and she rooted about on the chair of semi-abandoned clothes for a replacement.

When she turned back it wasn’t her face in the glass.

And then it was again.

She steadied herself on the nearest bedpost and swallowed. Her heart was all at once thumping in panic so loudly she heard it in her ears. Bright spots sparked across her vision. She chanced another look.

It was herself. Definitely herself. Wavy black hair, pale skin, thin black choker. In her heaving vision the face seemed to waver as if seen under water. She stared.

She had done this when she was a child, she remembered. Staring at her reflection until her sight got hazy and watery, watching her features warp and change, watching new bright spots develop and the face before her fade out of recognition. This was like that but she couldn’t look away. There was something underneath the face in the mirror.

It was sliding, the patches her skin wobbling on the top of a fluid interior, deforming over an unstable foundation. Her eyes didn’t look level. She touched her own face and found it the same and for one instant of forced self-control her proper image reasserted itself in the glass, scared but rational and normal.

But the force of transformation was too great and the entwining presence she already knew was there rose out of the depths of the mirror. Between tears and the heaving darkness of her hyperventilating sight grew the face that was hunting her. She shoved it away with hands but it wrapped itself around her. Under her knees the floorboards were hard and they scratched splinters into her face when she collapsed further. Sharp, too sharp, like claws. Something hurt her and she struck out.

The house was pounding like somebody knocking on the door and trying to get in, but louder, much louder. And then it was arms around her, trying to pull her up and she resisted them until she couldn’t any more.

Laura dragged her up off the floor and out of the broken glass spilling from where she had smashed the mirror. She threw the green blanket around her shoulders to keep her flailing arms in. Slowly she felt held.

“Carm. What happened?”

“I saw her. In the glass.”

“Who?”

“Her face. Looking down on me. I’m caught.” Laura twitched and loosened her grip on Carmilla, but that didn’t seem to be what she was talking about.

“Caught?”

“Caught, yes, trapped. She sees. She sees I’m caught. I’ve been here before. I know, it’s from being what happened badly. She has me and she won’t let go-”

It was all incoherent. “I’ve got you, Carm. It’s me who’s got you.”

Her eyes managed to open and she met Laura’s. That calmed her. “Yes. God. I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over-”

“Don’t get up!” Laura pushed Carmilla back down on the bed. “There’s glass on the floor and your feet are bare. Wait until you’re calmer and I’ll get a dustpan and brush. Who did you see that scared you?”

Her voice was thin and small. “My mother.” She heard Laura’s intake of breath.

“She’s dead.” It was all there was to say. “She’s been dead for seven years. She can’t hurt you. Can’t hurt us. You know she can’t.”

“It was her. My mother. With that look on her face. That says she’s caught me. I saw – I saw red. Red all through, like blood all over my face.” She did have blood over her face where the glass had scratched her, but Laura didn’t tell her that. It wasn’t thick, but there were three blotches on her forehead, lines on her cheek, one stain on her bottom lip. “I don’t see red now.”

Laura helped her sit up. The room was all green, the normal colour from the curtains to the carpet and the bedspread wrapped around her shoulders.

“It was my mother.” She spoke more lucidly now, her enunciation coming back. She could focus on Laura when she spoke. “I saw her… I saw her behind my face. Does that make sense? Like I was shifting, always changing form and it was because she had hold of me.”

“But she’s dead.” It seemed the best thing to keep repeating.

“Seeing her made me so… I was in a rage. I was hiding, I was afraid, but I was angry as well. So angry. So angry I could kill her.”

Their eyes met.

“Like we did before?”

The words were out of Laura’s mouth before she could think twice. It had been so long since they had spoken of it. Carmilla stared at her. Seven years ago they had done it.

“Like we did before.”

Laura waited.

“Do you remember?”

“Of course.”

“I was angry then. God, I was so angry. On the university tower, on the stone steps near the top. The gargoyles everywhere, lions and serpents and eagles and wolves all staring down and screaming with their empty mouths. She had hold of me and she had hold of you and she was screaming too, screaming, that I was an ungrateful little bitch and you were- well.”

Laura winced at her memory of what Carmilla’s mother had said that day. “And we came to the edge.”

“And we came to the edge. And she said I should go to hell if there were any justice. Go to hell. And you were trying to get me out of her grip and all I could think was that you needed to get away from me, you needed to save yourself. But there you were, wailing away and fighting her for who could hold on to me longer.”

“And she fell.” Laura pressed a kiss to Carmilla’s forehead. “And we both had you. But I held on better. You know I’ll always do that.” After the three of them tipped over the edge, Carmilla had spent half a minute clinging to the balustrade and Laura’s desperate hands until people came to haul her off it. Sometimes Laura dreamed of letting go and woke up in horror.

“We killed her.” 

Laura had never known what the right answer to that was. The police had determined death by misadventure, but she remembered the moment when they had almost been on the edge and somebody had _pushed_ \- her? Carmilla? Or Carmilla’s mother herself? It didn’t matter now. “Yeah, we killed her. And I’m glad we did. And she’s dead now.”

Carmilla’s eyes were empty of life. “And this is her house.”

“This is your house,” Laura reminded her. “Yours and no one else’s.”

“Hold me.”

“It’s why I’m here.”


	2. A Tithe To Hell

_And at the end of seven years_  
_They pay a tithe to hell_  
_I am so fair and full of flesh_  
_I fear it be myself_  
The Ballad of Tam Lin  


Holly staggered and almost fell sideways into a clump of nettles. The path was not hard over this expanse of meadowland but Karn's weight on her shoulder kept shifting and she could hardly walk straight for more than a few steps at a time. Karn took as much as she could on her own strength but she wavered constantly and Holly could not keep her steady for long. Behind them the bulk of the Long Mountain was lit up in the sunset and birds rose behind it.

Karn was drowsy, not entirely there. Her replies to Holly's efforts to keep her present came slowly and sometimes at an angle, as if she'd been following a slightly different conversation than the one here and now. "Pushed her off the tower," she mumbled, and Holly resolutely ignored this.

"When did the spirit come to you?" she asked instead to try to keep her in the present and focused on moving forward.

Karn shook her head. "Not a spirit," she said. "It's just me. It happens. Again and again. There's a face. It looks like someone I know but I don't know who." She lolled against Holly. "Where are we going?"

"Silas Hill, Karn. Remember? It's where you wanted to go." They were halfway there, stumbling across the vale. The sun was setting ablaze behind Silas Hill's silhouette crowned with three tors of piled rock.

"Shouldn't. You should go."

"I'm not leaving you like this. And we've had this argument twice already, so shut up and keep walking. Your mother will be able to look after you better than me."

Karn growled something unintelligible and raised her head to the glowing crest where crows were flocking between the scudding clouds. The hill looked unreal in this golden light, or rather it looked more real than everything else. The dark hole around which the remaining light rushed like a whirlpool pulling everything into the void at its centre. The hill was inevitable.

"I'm sorry for hurting you," she said as Holly dragged her unsteady legs over the trunk of a fallen oak. "I didn't want to have to do that."

Holly felt Karn's fingers squeeze her arm for a moment. She tried to concentrate.

"Any idea where on that hill you're meant to be?" she asked, and was answered by the thundering of hooves.

The riders burst upon them before she could react. She could not count. They circled around her and she caught glimpses of spears, helmets, mail armour. Each one whirled round them before she could look at their faces. Karn slumped from her shoulder and tried to stand straight but her feet were unsteady and she collapsed to her knees. Holly tugged Karn's head and made her look at the cut on her arm that would be so easy to cut into again and allow her to break through into the killing rage and be their escape. Karn's eyes upwards on hers were unreadable.

But the expected stroke never came. The riders stilled and were silent. Holly moved from impassive face to impassive face. Bearded men with scars, but there were women too and that made her uncertain. They were armoured as well as the men and not all were young. After a few seconds one of them came forward to dismount and take off her helmet. Her hair was red, flaming in the sunset, and her armour was without a single dint or mark. Karn looked up at her and managed to focus for a moment.

"Oh." She wavered sideways. "Mother."

The woman shot a sidelong glance at the baffled Holly and grabbed Karn by her chin, tugging her up. She turned her this way and that. In the mess of fiery light and shadows the bloodstains over her face crusted dark and foul.

"You flipped, girl. Didn't you?" She pursed her lips and turned on Holly. "Were you there? What did she do?" Her voice was low, even lower than Karn's, but there was a resemblance there.

"I... yes, I was there." Holly put her hand protectively on Karn's shoulder and there was a flicker in the red woman's eyes. "She killed five men who had us cornered."

"How did you escape her?"

"I didn't. She didn't hurt me. I mean, she didn't try."

"You're lying."

"I'm not!" She looked around for corroboration.

Karn stirred and got shakily to her feet. "She's not. I didn't hurt her. Wouldn't. Mother, she has to go now. So sorry, but she's come a bit out of her way. Sweetheart," she said to Holly. "South. Caer Isca is south and you should go now."

"Don't talk nonsense, girl. It's nearly dark and the country is crawling with soldiers. There's a whole army on the other side of the Long Mountain in case you hadn't noticed. Besides," and a smile came to her face that was almost indulgent and almost something else, "this one's too pretty to be lost down in Isca with my hopeless brother and his dull, dull men." The woman rubbed her hands together and looked at Holly like a cat contemplating cream. "And we must look after a girl with such rare talents. Managing my daughter," she said to Holly, "has hitherto been quite impossible. Once I had to lock her up for days before she lost her rage. She was quite covered in blood by the end. Do you remember, dear?"

Karn nodded and leaned against Holly. Holly's hand found her waist. The faces behind the woman were impassive and serious.

"There," the woman said. "It's settled. You'll be much more able to behave in future with your little friend around, won't you? Karn, you should introduce us properly."

Karn's eyes held her mother's for a few moments, her expression unreadable. "Mother, this is Holly. Holly, my mother. Morgan."

* * *

"The Queen has taken up residence," muttered Mircalla under her breath. Elle agreed silently. At the end of the dining room Lilita sat enthroned at the head of the table while Perry pottered around making herself visibly useful. Two more places were already set, one to each side of Lilita's ruling place, but they were not next to each other. 

She looked up. "Good morning girls." She flashed a smile, gone as quick as it came. "Mircalla. Elle." She patted each place as she said the names. "I hope you slept well after last night's little excursion." There was a pile of letters and papers to one side of Lilita's place, and she gathered them up as they came close, slipping them inside a portfolio.

They took their places at the table. She pushed a pot of tea at Mircalla, who ignored it and stared balefully at the jar of marmalade instead.

"Well. Time we had a little talk. Perry, leave us." She put down her toast and downed her remaining tea. Her eyes followed Perry as she scuttled out of sight and closed the door behind her.

"Mother, we-" Mircalla started.

"Hush, dear. Not right now. Elle. Please tell me how long Mircalla has suffered from this little... derangement." She folded her hands on the impeccable tablecloth and focused her attention on Elle, whose eyes proved as unequal to the task of Lilita as Mircalla's. She managed to look her in the neck, at the cameo brooch with the silhouette of a crow that gathered her collar.

"Derangement?" The tension was balling up in her stomach. She could see the future spinning out inevitably in front of them: separation, doctors, asylums, who knows what else.

"The sleepwalking, girl. How long?"

Elle's mind changed direction abruptly. She didn't look at Mircalla in case that would give the game away, but she couldn't look at Lilita either and she settled on the jumbled of books and pot plants that made up the wall behind Mircalla's head.. "Never, she never-"

"You're lying. Don't do that." Her face softened. "I understand, my dove. You had to keep it a secret in town. It would be so shameful if it came out. But you're safe now here. Have there been other manifestations? Does she have panic attacks ever? Feel faint sometimes?" Her manner was clipped, clinical.

"Er-" She hoped Lilita would read in her confused expression whatever was most convenient.

"I thought as much." She pursed her lips and turned to Mircalla. "Whatever possessed you to stay in London when you could have been back here, safe and watched over? I thank God you had the sense to get yourself a decent nurse at least, but if you're so badly taken that you need someone to watch over you when you sleep, why was none of this in your letters?" She sighed in exasperation.

Mircalla's mouth fell open and she shut it quickly. "A nurse."

"Or a warden. I know the word is not quite... but whatever you put in the advertisement." She waved airily at Elle. "She's had experience, I take it? Some previous engagement, you didn't just pick her up on trust?"

"My own mother," Elle said, thinking fast. "Before she died, I looked after her. It was my duty, of course. I was looking for work as a governess, but when I saw Mircalla's lines in the _Times_ , I had to come."

"See, Mircalla? A real example of filial duty. You could learn from your friend." She patted Elle's hand. "We'll look after her together, you and I. I'm already sure we're going to be firm friends. And isn't that a first!" She shot a glance at Mircalla and then leaned in conspiratorially to address Elle in a stage whisper. "I must admit I've not always been sure of Mircalla's taste in companions. Some very unsuitable girls. But you're a darling, aren't you?"

Ell's eyes darted to Mircalla, begging for help. "I'm sure they were... very nice really," she offered lamely and tried a joke. "I had a rebellious streak myself once."

Lilita laughed. "I couldn't imagine it to look at you. Mircalla, what was the name of that young lady you were inseparable with last year?" She said the last ironically, with a sideways expression to Elle of laughter. Elle tried a smile, but there was something stirring inside her that she didn't like.

Mircalla stared at her empty plate. "Melanippe," she muttered.

"Ah yes. Melanippe. Such a pretty girl, but she never could be ladylike." Something went out of her voice and face. She smiled still, but there was a painted feeling to it. Something moved behind her eyes. "What happened to her, Mircalla?"

"She went away. To Northumberland."

"Yes, that was it. She had to go live in a sanatorium. So very sad. A touch of hysteria." Lilita took more toast and bit through it sharply. "These things happen. Some girls are just not up to it."

* * *

Silas Hill looked less forbidding in the morning. Holly woke up as the early light came through the tent sides and lit up her pallet of straw. She lay there for a few moments trying to gather her mind together. It had been so long since she had slept in a bed like this. Clean aired straw too, not itchy stuff fresh from the field, and with dried herbs mixed into it so it smelt of heathland in the spring. It was all covered over with blankets and then more blankets on top of her - smooth warm wool and there was even a sheepskin for her pillow. It was a misleading dream of comfort, until she turned to see Karn and realised that no, she was awake.

Karn had not even got into her own bed properly. She lay face down and unwieldy like a drunk passed out after a late night. Limbs stuck out at ungainly angles. Holly watched her steady breathing. She slipped out of bed onto the rush mats that made the tent floor and managed to free enough of the blanket from under Karn to at least fold some over her in an imitation of comfort.

The tent was large enough not only for their beds but for a brazier carefully held within a brick base. The embers were low but still glowing slightly and the metal was warm. She threw her cloak over her shift to poke her head out of the tent flaps. There was nobody right about her, so she felt emboldened to walk barefoot over the wet grass to get her bearings. They had arrived in the night and all there had been then was darkness and holding on to the back of a tall woman as she urged her horse up the slope. Although the day was already alight, the little patch they camped in was shaded from the direct gaze of the early sun by the bulk of Silas Hill. 

She was standing in a sort of bowl halfway up the western flank of the hill. There were a couple more large and elaborate tents laid out in a rough line in this bowl, but the bulk of the camp was below at the foot of the hill. There lay a few dozen more smaller tents and rough wooden shelters. A firebrick cluster gave off smoke next to a busy complex that was obviously the kitchen. Horses grazed in a loose enclosure held in by quickly staked fences and another held goats. There might have been a hundred people gathered in the land below. People were awake there and moving around busily but they were too far off for Holly to see what exactly they were doing.

"Morning."

Karn was suddenly, quietly, at her shoulder and Holly winced as she realised she must have woken her up after all. She looked bad, almost hungover, but more able to bear it than on the previous night. Her bruises stood out sternly against her skin that was paler even than usual, and the few remaining smudges of gore shone shockingly in the morning light.

"How are you feeling?"

"Kind of dead." She closed her eyes and grimaced. "I was hoping I might have dreamed some of last night and you'd left me."

Holly remembered Karn trying to get her to leave when Morgan came. "I couldn't. You-"

"Kindness like that'll get you killed one of these days, sweetheart." She sighed. "Well, you're here now. And Mother seems to think you might be useful, which is... not great, but a lot better than her thinking there's no use for you." She glanced back at one of the other tents, perhaps holding Morgan within.

"Is she that bad?"

Karn smiled and shrugged. "She's the most dangerous person you'll ever meet. But that cuts both ways - no need to fear armies here, pretty girl. And life with her has other advantages. For example, why don't you go back to the tent? I'll go make a fuss." She winked, and Holly was enough taken aback that she did as Karn said.

She was a while but when she came back she brought a procession with her. Two large men carried a great copper bathtub and another a similarly huge copper basin. This last was put down on the brazier and the embers brought back to life with fresh wood. Meanwhile the ferrying of water from down below began. It was extravagance to carry it up bucket by bucket from whatever well or spring supplied the camp below, but the men and women - Morgan's attendants, Holly guessed - did it without complaining. From some unseen store, clean clothes were found.

"That'll do," Karn said when the bath was full of hot water and the basin was simmering with more in reserve. She nodded her head at the tent flap and everyone scurried off. They were apparently used to waiting on their mistress's daughter. "Help yourself, honeycake."

Holly flushed. Karn showed no particular sign of wanting to leave.

"No, um, after you. I can-" she flustered, "get all clean and naked later. Uh. I mean, not all naked, I could be clothed and-"

Karn just raised an eyebrow and gestured back to the bath. "Get on with it before it gets cold." She sat down on her bed facing away and, apparently ignoring Holly, started tugging off the boots she had not even removed last night.

Holly weighed her shyness against hot water and the water won. She pulled off her shift and sank into the merciful water. She had just dunked her head in when Karn reappeared in front of her. She ignored the embarrassed squeak and pulled a blanket off her bed to drape across the top of the bath so Holly could stew in the water modestly. Her eyes were disciplined and stayed on Holly's. From one side of the tent she carried a short bench and set it down next to the bath. She sat very close to Holly.

"Thank you," she said. "For what you did yesterday. It was a stupid, stupid thing but I'm glad you did it."

"Morgan said nobody else had calmed you down before."

"Nobody can do that. Nobody. That's what I would have said yesterday. I mean, sometimes I've been overpowered and sometimes the rage runs out. But yesterday was a great fury, and you still held me in." She paused. "Have you done it before? To someone like me?"

"I've never met anyone like you." She realised how that sounded as soon as she said it and went red. The apology died on her lips, though, because Karn ducked her head and was a little less pale afterwards herself.

* * *

Carmilla was stargazing, because that was what she did when she was broody. Laura silently made the cocoa and went out to join her. She slung her girlfriend's forgotten coat over her arm and tucked it around her shoulders when she joined her, because of course Carmilla had gone out without it. They sat on the bank that circled the house. Stones were set into the lip and they dangled their legs over onto the slopes of Silas Hill. Below them was mist, thickening gently in the dark night and rippling into half-seen forms, but they were above it as if above a great sea. There was no cloud above, so Silas House swum in the ocean of mist under a clear sky.

The skies were better here than back in the city. There were still faint orange smudges on some parts of the horizon marking towns beyond the hills, but above them and out to the west the sky was unmarred by artificial light. It was cold - the kind of night that leached heat out into space and the morning would be frosty. Laura tucked her mittened hands around her mug and cuddled up to Carmilla, who had been staring unmoving into space for the last half-hour and would probably have done so all night had she not been interrupted.

"That's the Milky Way?" She knew it was, but she still asked. The pale band streaked across the sky like a road.

"Yes. And that bright star in the middle is Deneb. The head of Cygnus." Carmilla knew Laura knew and knew also why Laura still asked about stars as if they were doing this for the first time. She took a swig of cocoa and looked down. "Is there booze in this?"

"Brandy. What do you think?"

"Hell yeah." She took another mouthful.

"That one?" She pointed.

"Altair, on the wing of Aquila."

"That one."

"Vega, the tip of the Lyre. You knew that."

"That one."

"Cookie, the small and very annoying. Ouch!" Laura elbowed her in the side. "It's called Cookie! I definitely didn't make that up right now."

"What are we, American?"

"Biscuit doesn't have the same diminutive ring to it, pretty girl."

Laura weighed up options. "Well so long as you don't go anywhere near 'muffin'." From out of the mist below, a fluttering arose as bats broke out of the woods and went hunting. She broke the question. "What do you think happened in that room before I came in?"

Carmilla shrugged. "I don't know. Probably a hallucination. They happen even to sane people sometimes, you know. Just a really vivid daydream. And you know what panic attacks do to me."

"Yeah, but you've never-"

"No. But I've not been back here since I was eighteen. I packed up my stuff, went off to university, and never came back. So it stands to reason there was something waiting here for me. Apparently it was my extenuated psychological issues." She raised the mug in a mock-toast to their newly-arrived companion. "And here was me thinking it was just going to be the rediscovery of my awful teenage taste in bedroom decor."

"You still haven't showed me your old room, you know," Laura pointed out. Carmilla looked mildly ashamed of her reluctance to pry too far into the vacated past. That room and her mother's had been quietly ignored so far, like cupboards dangerously likely to spill over if the doors were opened. "Are we going back to the city?"

She shook her head. "Got to face it sooner or later. If I run now, it'll be worse when it comes around next time. You know. Besides," she added with a twist of her face that was not a smile, "if it _wasn't_ a hallucination then I'm damn well not giving her the satisfaction. The bitch doesn't stand a chance with the righteous fury of Laura Hollis beside me."

Laura kissed her cheek. "That's the stuff. You should tell your therapist how well you're taking it. She'll be pleased." She took a mouthful of alcoholic cocoa and confessed, "I don't think I would be. Having to be set back like this, I mean. Is that the wrong thing to say?"

"Nah, you like to move forward, cupcake. You like to plan things with regular milestones, right? You like," she waved vaguely, trying to find the words. "Straight lines, timelines. Every day moving forward, a set of goals. And I love you for that. You know how that's helped me? When I was living with my mother it was just trying to find a safe place and not move from it. Without you, I don't know if I'd have any larger purpose. But," she shrugged, "there's something to be said for a bit of fatalism when battling head fuckups. You don't get so discouraged by relapses."

"Kind of fucked up coping mechanism when you think about it, Carm."

"Yep." Her face curved into a half-smile. "Didn't you learn to play the Harry Potter theme on water glasses when you were having that bad time at work?"

Laura had the grace to look embarassed. "I did. I did that. It was a minor achievement to distract from my epic lack of achievement at work. Or in writing." She smiled. "It's nice to have a project - even if you're only moving forward on craft skills to distract from the crushing failure of your five year plan."

"Kind of fucked up coping mechanism when you think about it, cupcake."

"Yep." She leaned her head against her girlfriend's shoulder. "I did like your way of trying to distract me though. It was very effective."

"I should hope so, it was bloody exhausting." She put down her mug and let herself lean slowly backwards, ignoring Laura's protest over the loss of her leaning post, until they were lying with their backs on the damp gravel looking straight up at the stars. The patterns hung remote and familiar. "They're so far away," she mused. "All the people, all the people we've ever been - nothing to that light. Even the patterns we see in them are only from here."

"You are definitely a philosophy graduate," Laura teased. "Or astronomy. How far is that one? Cygnus?" She pointed to the crux in the middle of the Milky Way.

"It depends. The stars are all a long way from each other as well. Sometimes even further from each other than they are from us. That one in the centre, Cygnus' heart, that's about a hundred and forty, a hundred and fifty light years away. And that's how long the light takes to get here, so we're seeing it as it was in 1870-something. And that one there on the wing," she moved Laura's hand, "that's centuries older. A millenium and a half or a little more. If someone were on that star and looked at us, they'd see this hill as it was at the end of the fifth century."

"And the pattern only makes sense from here?"

"Only from here. Like a photo album. All at different times, but put them together in one place and we can trace patterns through them." She watched the glowing arm of the Milky Way which bound them into the great spiral and frowned. "Though not for long. You know, the Solar System moves through space and so does every other star. The constellations are breaking apart. We'll never see them again, not like this."

"No?"

"No. They drift apart slowly. Very slowly, so you wouldn't notice. But they'll never be quite the same."

* * *

Mircalla stared out of her bedroom window at the sight of Lilita being helped into the carriage by Wilson and driven away on her morning visits to the neighbours now that she was back in the county. She leaned her forehead against the glass and let out a breath that fogged the cold pane. Outside the landscape was chilled to the bone. There was frost on the grass and the sky was white with featureless cloud. Winter was coming.

"We survived," Elle offered. She tried to sound positive. "And we've got an alibi now." She held Mircalla and tucked her chin onto her shoulder. 

"We're still trapped, my love. What do we do? If I'd left you in London she could have kept us apart forever. If we try to hurry away she'll use my 'illness' to keep me coddled here. And I wouldn't be surprised if she gives Wilson lots of jobs to do with the carriage whenever she's not using it. We're prisoners. I should have made some excuse and not come."

"It'll be fine. We'll come up with something. Oh, sea air!" she burst out suddenly with a moment of inspiration and watched the smile at her excitement twitch at the corners of Mircalla's mouth despite the misery. "Sea air's good for you, isn't it? She'd have to let us go for that. We'll go to Brighton. Or maybe we can sell your place in London and get somewhere at a resort, there's loads of places for invalids at Torquay. We can go for walks on the beach."

"Breakfast on the balcony at St Ives," Mircalla purred, life returning to her voice. "If I'm ill, we'll have to spend a lot of time in bed."

Elle beamed and squeezed her shoulder. "There, see! We've managed so far, we'll manage in the future. Now, haven't we got investigating to do?" Mircalla wavered a little, but Elle's hope was infectious and the need for distractions was urgent. She felt herself cheering up despite herself.

They set the little table - paper, pencil, water glass. After a moment's thought and a flash of a grin, Elle ran downstairs and came bounding back up with the silver chalice they had found in the bad silverware cupboard and that she had so liked. She emptied the water from the glass into it and beamed at their enhanced seance paraphernalia. Mircalla raised an eyebrow. 

"I thought it deserved something with gravitas." She admired her handiwork and dusted off her skirts. Mircalla had to admit it looked more occult than a cheap tumbler.

Elle chewed her lip thoughtfully and rolled up the lace cuffs of her sleeves as far as she could. She kissed 'Calla's fingertips and then the two of them laid their hands to flat on the table. Mircalla half-closed her eyes ready to sink into trance. She stilled her heartbeat as best she could, quieted her breathing, entered the place under the surface that was impossible to point to but always there.

At least, that was how she understood it. She didn't really know how this worked, except that it turned up things that couldn't possibly be coming from the depth of her own subconscious. They had drawn up great schemes of the spirit world in the early days, she and Elle covering reams of paper in the results of their explorations, constantly crossing ideas out. Elle, always the faster thinker, was beginning to believe that what they did was more akin to trawling a net through the sea than making an appointment. What they turned up was elusive, changing, subtle. Sometimes it was ambiguously close to the two of them, such as the occasion on which the planchette had spelt out an anagram of Mircalla's name and the letter _L_ again and again. It had occurred to both of them that all they were doing was pulling up the roots of their own imaginings, but every time this suspicion great too great something happened to disturb it. Like the unsettlingly direct conversation of two nights ago, in which the spirit communicating through her had had wilful ideas about what it wanted to say.

"Is there anyone there?" Elle asked, when they were both in place. "We come in peace."

The room was quiet except for their breathing. The curtains were still. The lamps shone steadily and did not waver. The silence in their minds settled deeper.

"You may speak through me," Mircalla offered. Underneath them, a floorboard let out a soft creak, settling a little. She kept her half-open eyes away from the curtains and the lamps and the heavy velvet hangings around the bed. It was too easy to focus on the wrong thing and so miss the right one.

"Is there anyone there?" Elle asked again.

Mircalla felt it growing on the back of her neck like the certain uncomfortable knowledge of a person standing right behind her. Tingling rolled down her arms as if they were touched. Her eyes met Elle's. There was the indescribable feeling of somebody's lips posed right next to her ear and saying nothing but being entirely present. She relaxed and leaned back into the other. Her eyelids fluttered.

"Are you the same spirit we encountered before?" Elle watched Mircalla carefully for signs of worry.

"Not a spirit," Mircalla countered, but before Elle could believe this to be an admission of failure, she continued in a slurred voice. "It's just me. It happens. Again and again." She lolled against the back of her chair. "Where are we going?"

"We're not going anywhere," Elle reassured the visitor. "We're still at Silas Hill."

"Shouldn't. You should go. My mother is a dangerous person."

Elle frowned. "'Calla?" But there was no response. If it was her lover's thoughts coming out of her lips, she wasn't owning up to them.

"I'm sorry for hurting you. I didn't want to have to do that."

"But you-" Elle began in confusion and then the door swung open. They sprung apart and dropped each other's hands. Mircalla was herself again in an instant, startled out of the receptive state by the appearance of Sarah-Jane in the doorway with a basket full of dusters and associated paraphenalia.

She looked embarrassed to have interrupted, but somehow not surprised to have done so. There was a little too much innocence on her face for it to be entirely natural. "Beg pardon, Misses," she said. "I hope I'm not interrupting."

"Really not," Mircalla growled and stood up. "I'm getting something to drink. Lemonade, cupcake?" she offered and Elle nodded. She left the room and abandoned Elle to sideways glances from the maid. Sarah-Jane kept it to glances though, and offered nothing.

Elle tried to push down the sense that she should be feeling guilty (and for what? she reminded herself). "We were talking," she offered lamely when Sarah-Jane's dusting had become too much for her to bear.

"Yes, Miss. You don't need to tell me that." She plucked two worn candle-stubs out of their holders and replaced them. "A good day for it. Staying indoors I mean. Are you sure you wouldn't rather have a fire on a day like this?" She unfolded a paper bag of coals from her basket and started laying them.

"Thank you."

"It's what I'd like to be doing, Miss. It's my day off tomorrow, and if it's anything like this cold I'll not be moving from the fire in my Mam's front room. She lives down in the village."

"Wouldn't you get bored?"

The maid looked shocked at the suggestion. "Oh _no_ Miss. I've six sisters! All the gossip Mam has will last a whole day, and then I've to tell her _mine_." She leaned closer, conspiratorial. "Sometimes if Wilson has his day off on the same as mine, he comes for tea too." A touch of pink came to her cheek and Elle grinned back.

The overheard discussion between Sarah-Jane and the other maid Natalie from a few days before came to mind. "Do you... know much gossip?" she asked. "I've never... Mircalla doesn't talk about her life before London a lot."

Sarah-Jane restrained her pride, a woman in possession of privileged information. "I could tell you a thing or two, Miss. But you'd rather I didn't, I'm sure. And it's all gossip anyway," she added in a hurry as possible consequences swum into view. "All rumour. I don't believe a word of it, not me. Still, I hear things."

"Things about," she paused. "Melanippe? And... Betty?"

"You've been talking to someone." Sarah-Jane waited to be reassured she hadn't been overheard.

"Lilita mentioned some names," Elle said, with strict accuracy. This seemed sufficient.

"Well, Miss." She leaned closer. "She won't have told you all, that's for sure. Melanippe now, she's the daughter of old Mr Callis who was in business with Mistress Lilita's late husband, the old Master. Something big in Bristol to do with India, it was. And when his wife died the year before last - god rest her soul - Mr Callis started coming round, so he did. Round a lot." She nodded decisively and, with that implication firmly in place, carried on in the same hushed tone. "And him and the Mistress talked business at all hours, which left the girls alone. They took right to each other. Just what Mircalla was hoping for in a friend."

"What was she like?" Elle asked.

"Big and sporting she was. Riding, lacrosse, polo, tennis. You scarcely even saw her indoors. And she'd a mind of her own too, never did you see her tagging along behind anyone else." She had given up any pretence of dusting now and dumped her basket of things on the bed. She sat down opposite Elle in the other chair.

Before she realised she was saying it out loud Ell said, "I'm not like that. Not the sporting, I mean."

Sarah-Janes face was innocence itself. "No, Miss. You're quite different if you don't mind me saying. Anyway, they took to each other at once." She paused.

"And then what?"

"I don't rightly know, Miss. But she and Mircalla had some kind of disagreement. This was at the Callis house over in Shrewsbury, you understand. Mircalla was visiting on her own so none of us were there. But we knew there was something not right when she came back earlier than planned. Normally it was quite the opposite, you know. And the next thing we hear, old Mr Callis has sent Melanippe clean away. Said she was sick, said she went to live in a rest home somewhere up north."

"What was she sick with?"

"I don't know, Miss. Leastways-" Sarah-Jane shot a glance at the door lest Mircalla be returning. "There was no quarantine, if you understand me, and old Mr Callis and Mistress Lilita still visited each other. So it makes one wonder if it were the kind of illness that's in the head or soul rather the body if you catch my meaning. And if you please Miss, I'll not say more." She stood up straight again and recalled herself to her task.

"Why not?"

"It's not for me to judge, Miss. My betters, I mean. It's not for me to judge if they make choices about each other. But there's some who do, and that's all I'm saying." She lapsed into silence and made the rumpled bedclothes with particular vigour to emphasise this.

Elle didn't leave. There was an unpleasant feeling growing inside her. Sarah-Jane had said nothing more about the other girl, Betty, than what Elle had overheard her gossiping about with Natalie the other day but this wasn't the time to push it. She tried to think of something to distract her that wasn't Mircalla's possible former lovers.

"This house isn't that old, is it?"

Sarah-Jane stiffened a bit, expecting there to be a hidden agenda, but answered anyway. "Oh no. No, not like some down in the valley."

Elle affected naivete. "That's a pity. I've not been much out of London and I was hoping for some great ghost-filled ruin on the moors full of dark secrets. Do you read Mrs Radcliffe?"

"No, Miss. But there's ghosts enough around here if you ask down in the village. Of course, Revered Smalls doesn't like it if we say so, but there's plenty. You'd not find a single one who'd go to the fountain at midnight, that you wouldn't, nor anyone who'll drink from it at any time of day."

"The fountain?"

"Down below, in the woods. Oh, it's a spring really, but there's something not right about it. No-one knows what by, but everyone knows it's haunted."

* * *

Karn led Holly out into the day. Washed and with her new clothes she looked a different person from the one who had waded through rivers and killed brigands, but she still kept the axe hooked onto her belt as a mute reminder. In the hand not leading Holly she carried the silver chalice wrapped in a bundle of cloth. Morgan stood already waiting for them on the lip of the shelf set into the hill, watching down below her followers working. She had her red hair unbound and the expression on her face was unreadable. She looked like she was perched on the front of a ship and looking out over the ocean. 

"Good morning, mother." Karn stood beside her and scooped Holly in to hold her at her side. "I brought it." She handed the chalice across. Her manner was formal, a soldier reporting to her captain.

Morgan unwrapped it and weighed it in her hand. She turned it over with the smallest of smiles. "And undamaged too. Thank you, my dear. What would I do without you, my red right hand?" Her voice was in some way posed, like she was deliberately speaking in a way unfamiliar to her. "Where were they? Was there much difficulty in the getting?"

Karn shrugged. "In Londinium, heading for the Narrow Sea. But the city's collapsed since Aelle and Aesc formed their league. There's no government and it's half abandoned. Grass grows in all the streets save two." She sounded mournful. "There was no trouble dealing with them in a place like that."

"Excellent. And there's no need to sound so sad about it dear, cities fall as often as they rise. We shall sweep those petulant upstarts away once more significant matters are concluded." Behind her, a gust of wind arose and a gaggle of crows took wing from the top of the hill. "What did you learn of the war hereabouts?"

"Nothing you don't know already. The North will win. They have the men, they have the choice of field, they have the Lleyn Irish and the Saxons in Letocetum. Glevum will not stand."

"No. And when the whole mess is concluded, those mercenaries will have bought themselves positions to be levied into kingdoms later. Uricon will be surrounded by allies who have grown stronger and greedier and less grateful than them." She laughed, a strangely happy sound from such a grim woman, and again Holly was reminded of Karn's sudden changes of mood. "Round and round the silly creatures go, and here we are in the still centre." She turned to Holly. "What do you think, pretty girl? Whose side are wise women on?"

Holly gulped. "Our... own?" she ventured.

Morgan twisted out a smile, up one side of her face but not the other. "Smart girl. I can see why Karn likes you. That's right, my little duck. While they're all busy fighting each other, we remake the island in our own way. There's a full moon in three nights," she added to Karn, who shifted uneasily. "Oh, don't fret. I've enough without needing any, ah, additional resources."

"Who this time?" Karn asked, with a glance at Holly. The conversation was going over Holly's head.

"Caer Isca."

"The Dux?"

"Oh yes. Caer Isca is just near enough Glevum that with a little push we can spill the war a bit further west. And what happens when the Dyfed Irish get involved too? Ah, chaos. I've held off long enough from giving that prancing bastard what he deserves." She clapped her hands with an air of finality. "You'll dine with me tonight, the pair of you. Apart from that I shan't expect to need you for a few days, so run along and play." She kissed Karn on the cheek formally, gave Holly the most fractional of nods and turned about face to withdraw to her tent. Karn blew out a breath.

"What did she mean about the full moon?" Holly whispered, though she couldn't have been overheard even out loud.

Karn's face was carefully devoid of expression. "She has her rituals to perform. I wouldn't worry about them, sweetheart. Magic isn't my trade, I just do the heavy lifting." She looked down to where smoke was rising from the kitchen area. She put her hand to her stomach. "Hungry? We didn't eat last night."

Holly nodded enthusiastically. She hadn't eaten all of yesterday for that matter and had been on short rations even before that. The feeling was only just catching up with her after all the others things that had happened. 

Down below in the shadow of Silas Hill, life was busy. Men were splitting logs at the edge of the woods; there was a trio kneeling round a great quernstone milling grain. From somewhere Holly couldn't see came the sound of iron being hit on an anvil. It was a small but fully prepared, self-sufficient retinue. There were both men and women but no children - at least, nobody below the age of eighteen or so. Some of them looked like hardened soldiers or experienced craftsmen; others could have been waifs and strays picked up in any corner of the island. Most of them wore, somewhere on their person, something red: a scarf or a sash. Those that didn't were mostly the hangers-on, the camp followers and suchlike. All of the soldiers wore red cloaks, and their shields showed a crow on a red field.

"Who are all these people?" she asked. A tall woman led a horse past and nodded at her. Holly stared blankly before recognising her too late as the one who had carried her into the camp last night.

"Servants. Soldiers. Labourers. My mother likes to have people on hand to do what she does."

"And what's that?" Holly pushed. Morgan's words on the hilltop had sounded more like the ravings of a madwoman than the politics of a noblewoman. "Cause chaos?"

"She has her own ideas about the direction this island should go," she said carefully. "Best not to question them."

"Are they yours?" Karn looked deeply at her without replying, so she tried again. "I mean, what about you? What do you want to happen? Are you really going to help her start more wars?"

"Like I say, sweetheart, I don't much care. I do my job. And if my job for the next few days involves eating and drinking and maybe another bath I shan't have anything to say against it." Karn stuck her head into the weave of leather screens around a firebrick oven that served as the bakery. "Any bread going?" There was an answer Holly couldn't hear and she sat down on the ground outside, pulling Holly down with her. "They'll get us something."

After a short pause a large young man lumbered out. He was carrying a long loaf of bread and after setting it down in Holly's welcoming arms set off again to return with a knife, a wooden trencher and a pair of dried sausages.

"Thank you!" Holly beamed. He stood there smiling for a moment without leaving.

"Yes, thank you beefcake," Karn growled. "Run along now."

"Are you really the red lady's daughter?" he asked. Karn fixed him with a death glare which he seemed not to notice. "That's incredible. I didn't believe Derfel when he said, I didn't think she was that normal to have children."

"And you know her well, do you?" Karn was withering but again this went entirely over his head.

"No, no way! She only found me last month."

Holly frowned. "Found?"

He nodded. "I mean, there I was trying to keep what was left of the inn going after the soldiers trashed it and killed- anyway, it was a bad time. But then _she_ comes through with all those women with spears and told me I was a darling and should come with her. And I didn't know _what_ to think, are they playing a trick on me? But there was a couple of others they'd found with them and they said it was fine. So here I am! I've not spoken to her since." He looked awed by being so close to the 'red lady's' daughter. "Save my life, though. I wouldn't have lasted the winter that's for sure."

"How... charitable of her." Karn caught Holly's expression and she managed a weak smile and a formally chilly expression of gratitude. "Thank you for the bread, beefcake."

"Any time." He got to his enormous feet and loped happily back into the bakery. Karn broke the bread and offered half of it with a sausage to Holly. She accepted it gladly and chewed over Morgan's strange charity to waifs and strays while eating. "Mmm, is there anything to drink?"

"Come on." Karn hauled her to her feet. "Spring's round by the base of the hill."

They took a path that led to the base of the hill but then turned right before the way up to Morgan and Karn's tents. Karn held the sausages while Holly held the bread, and the two of them stopped several times to pass each other pieces. There was a muddy scour where the constant passage of feet had turned the ground to slush, and Karn held out a hand to help Holly across it.

"The distance has gone from between us," Holly said, and realised at once she had said it out loud. But instead of the expected retort or exasperated silence, Karn was looking at her with eyes suddenly so deep and there was understanding at the bottom of them.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, it has."

The spring was almost hidden from the camp by the trees, but the path to it was tramped and muddy with all the coming and going. The horses needed bucket after bucket everyday, but there was no shortage. It came out of a crevice in the hill, and somebody in the distant past had cut back into the rock to set it free. There was a pool at its base with leaves floating in it, although most of these had been cleared out and lay dumped in a heap to one side. On the rock face behind, a spiral was carved.

Karn dipped her waterskin in and handed it to Holly. It was shockingly cold but clean tasting and a welcome relief. She gave it back to Karn and watched the way the spilled drops ran in a curl down her cheek and around the tendons of her neck. She was still watching when Karn asked her what she was staring at. To cover her embarrassment she looked up and around, pretending to have been casting around for everything in sight. Up on the hill, the figure of Morgan was visible again, standing on the ledge and looking out to the west.

"What is she doing up there?" Holly wondered. Morgan was not looking down at them in the land below, or up at the sky. She was looking forward, as to the far distance, but there was purpose in her pose. She was looking for something, far off.

* * *

Laura sighed and stared at the screen. _Inspiration_ , she thought, as if the mere wish would summon up the remainder of the chapter and the big plot twist that definitely needed to happen and whose consequences she could see so well but the actual form of which remained elusive. Every time she thought she had got a hold on it, it flicked away into a new problem or a different possibility.

Still, things progressed. She had managed a thousand words the day before, which was good work by anyone's count. Today was languishing in the long dark writing moment of the soul, two hundred words down and the initial impetus gone without any sign of the next.

On the other side of the sofa, nobly not even trying to distract her, Carmilla turned another page. She read slowly, methodically, and every time she turned a page she looked up to check on Laura and smiled gently. Everything about her spoke of absorption. She had the way of it, Carmilla, she was able to sink deep and down into the things that preoccupied her and stay there for hours. Sometimes Laura found her lying somewhere comfortable and just watching and listening to the world, like a cat that had found somewhere warm to contemplate the slow turning of the day around it.

Laura, by contrast, fidgeted. Even when she was still she fidgeted. Right now she had a window open with the slow progress of her story, but she was also fidgeting with an article for her website about local news and why it was not fit for purpose and why she was the person who could make it fit. And there was a window open showing the national news, and a window open reporting the latest rumours about a certain film she wanted to be good but was horribly afraid would be ruined because _he_ was directing it who was so patently unworthy to take on a beloved character.

She made a gargantuan effort and focused herself down on the story again. If she wasn't getting anywhere with the plot, she could always write something further ahead and then go back later. There was already a big hole in the early part of this chapter, which she had bracketed and left for last. She hated to do that. She preferred to move forward: Always Be Progressing The Plot, that teacher from the creative writing class she took last summer had said. She like that idea, but it was more easily said than done.

She was behind her schedule as well. The plan had been one chapter every two weeks for the duration of the story. That had fallen behind, and then it had fallen behind more and then more. And _then_ three days ago, the day before Carmilla had had the... freak-out, she had downed two pots of coffee while her girlfriend was too busy taking a leisurely shower to stop her and promptly stormed through four thousand words before sprinting all the way around Silas Hill without doing her trainers up properly. So she was almost back on track, which was where she liked to be.

Inspiration. Where the frilly hell did it come from? It arrived sometimes and other times it didn't and the most frustrating thing was that it didn't arrive in response to waiting. It seemed to require the most abject depths of frustration before the gods took pity on the struggling writer and threw some metaphorical cupcakes her way. The current story, for instance. Just half an hour ago she had had nothing after an hour's despair and then a phrase had dropped into her head: _The distance is gone from between us_. She used it at once, although it took a few trials before she decided who it was better coming from. And then when it came out of the character's mouth, she was off and away. It was almost like she had overheard it being said and that was all that was needed to jog her memory.

The phone rang next to Carmilla. She grunted a query into it and brightened up at the sound of the voice on the other end. "Hey nerd!" She put her book properly down and settled the phone in her hand now that it was definitely not a telemarketer. "LaF," she mouthed to Laura.

"Hello LaF!" Laura said, as loud as she could manage. Carmilla rolled her eyes and spoke into the phone.

"Yeah, doing good. The wine cellar's still intact... no, we're being healthy. Plenty of exercise... what? _Outdoor_ exercise, you ginger creep. How's the lab extravaganza going?"

On the other end, LaFontaine ran through a report of their almost-creepy work on artificial blood.

"Met any vegan vampires yet? Yeah, well I'm glad it's going well. How's uptight and curly? She's doing what? Like, _what_? Like - no, don't tell me. I'll have to see that for myself... yeah, Laura's doing good too. When she's not drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee and babbling."

"I'm... yeah, I'm okay. Better than I thought I'd be, anyway. Actually... LaF, I had a bit of a funny turn the other day. Oh, don't worry! It was a one-time thing. Yeah, I told her. _Yes_ , I'm taking it. No, it was just - super vivid daydream, you know?" Laura made a sympathetic face at Carmilla being on the receiving end of ginger concern.

The worrying on the other end of the phone continued.

"Nope. Absolutely not. I'm staying right here. Oh, come on! LaF, if I come back now because I had a fucking daydream, can you imagine how screwed I'll be? Talk about setting yourself up for failure, it'll be twice as bad if I ever have to do all this again. Nope, I'm going to stay here till it won't be running away. That'll put a smile on my stupid therapist's face anyway."

Laura gave a thumbs up.

"Yeah, I know. But that was in another time and besides, the bitch is dead." She laughed at whatever LaFontaine had said. "That's it, anyway. But you were calling about - oh, right. Yes. Yes, we will. The twentieth, that's the plan. Do you want to talk to Laura? Oh, right." She spoke away from the phone to Laura. "Ginger nerd's on their way out, so no gossip today. Just wanted to check Christmas plans." Laura nodded and she went back to the phone. "OK. Talked me into getting some bikes tomorrow so I'll let you know which of us goes flying over the handlebars first. Although she's probably got a website about bike safety lined up, you know what she's like. Yeah, you too. Have a good time playing with your fake blood, nerd."

Fake blood, though Laura, as the universe lined up mysteriously in her favour and the lines of inspiration were established. _Yes, that would work, because-_

She was so absorbed in typing that she didn't even look up to Carmilla's account of LaFontaine's news.

* * *

Mircalla lay on a blanket in the woods with Elle beside her, flushed and with her breathing still returning to normal. It was cold but bearable, even with the tangling of her clothes after they had been shuffled around and out of the way. But not off - late October was not the time for that. The house hardly seemed a safe place during daylight, but nobody came down to the woods, still less to the screened thickets of holly at its centre. Elle lay against her, lazing happily wrapped in her green coat and with her stockings still down at her knees.

Up above them, through the understory of the holly and the nearly bare crowns of oak the sky was a bright cloudless blue. The wood was full of shuffling in fallen leaves: squirrels, blackbirds, jays fighting over acorns. They had seen the dark mouths of badger sets and foxholes coming into this hidden place and she wondered how far underground they went and whether any were sleeping a yard below her. She imagined her soul leaving her body and sinking through the inches of rotting leaves and soil and bones and stones to what lay beneath. At times like this she could almost feel the presence of the ghosts. They must be there all the time, if they could come so easily to a seance. And yet they so rarely showed themselves and she wondered if it was because some other meaning of _distance_ was placed between them or if they purposefully did not make themselves known.

She stirred and sat up. Her watch showed her the afternoon pushing on. "Cupcake. Are we going to see this fountain or not?" She nudged her dozing lover and received an incoherent grumble in reply, but Elle did eventually stagger upright and make a token effort into putting her clothes in some form of order. They shifted camp from the unseen tangles of holly in the centre of the wood to the lighter border with sycamores and guarding oaks on the woodbank.

The fountain was set into the side of Silas Hill where it met the woods and a thin path crossed its outfall: a natural spring quarried out into the side of the hill and spilling into a shallow pool. On the stone wall at the back, a spiral was carved.

"Nobody ever said it was haunted when I was young," Mircalla said with skepticism.

"Sarah-Jane was very definite," Elle said. "The ghost of a pale woman has been seen around it, ever since last year. She said some bones had been found." She fumbled in her bag and retrieved the silver chalice they had found the other day. "And this has got spiral patterns on it, look. Just like on the stone there," she pointed at the wall behind the fountain, "and the one you drew when you were in trance."

They leaned over and Mircalla brushed the covering of fallen leaves to one side. The water was cold from its long chilling under the earth, and clear too. At their feet the small notch took the overflow and dribbled it into a tiny stream no wider than a foot drifting gently downhill at the side of the wood.

"I don't see anything. Just our own faces." Elle bent a bit closer and the surface of the water rippled under her breath. Their faces wavered with it and for an instant they were shape-changing and unsettled. Below them, which was above them, the sky wavered blue. She dipped her hand in and hit the muddy bottom after submerging her arm up to her shoulder. Her hand came up soiled and she wiped it off on the heather overhanging from the hillside.

Mircalla wrinkled her nose. "Do you think she died here? The ghost?"

"Could be. Or buried. Or something else."

"You don't know, is what you're saying, cupcake?"

"Right." Elle sculled her fingers in the water. "Springs and wells and bridges always turn out to have ghosts in novels. So we've got the lot, right? House in the middle of nowhere, ghosts at the well, an evil old woman keeping the two lovers apart... what?" She tailed off. Mircalla's face was pained, uncertain.

"She's my mother. She's a part of who I am, Elle. She's... "

"Oh, come on. You hate her. I know you do. Why not just-"

"Don't. Sweetheart, don't. She raised me, she sent me to school. You can't expect all of that to just evaporate because I love you."

"Well no, but." Elle stopped, and sighed, and opted to take Mircalla in her arms instead of pushing the conversation onto dangerous ground. It was all so simple to her, what had to be done. Run, fight. She sighed. "But we have to get out from her grasp. Somehow."

* * *

Morgan's tent was twice as large as Karn and Holly's and much more heavily furnished. The hem of the outside was embroidered in swirling patterns that flapped in the wind, but inside kept the night at bay. A folding wooden screen hid her bed and another was spread across the door hung with woollen cloth to keep the cold out. In one corner a large brazier glowed and in the other an arrangement of pallets covered in furs served as couches around a low table. Morgan reclined there, wrapped in red and with a fox fur around her neck gathered with a carnelian brooch. She smiled slowly at Karn and Holly as they came in.

"Dears. Have a place." She waved at the couches. "Food will be here shortly." She clicked her fingers and from an unnoticed waiting place a silent woman came forward with a jug and goblets. She poured wine as Karn took her place and Holly tried to work out how reclining and drinking from a goblet at the same time was supposed to work.

"Left elbow," Karn whispered, "but put the cushions behind you and your weight back. Like you're rolling out of bed." Holly managed to get herself sorted - shifted rather closer to Karn than she'd planned, but she did not hurry to correct this.

Morgan watched with amusement. "The Romans may have been unearthly bores, but they did have their good points. Comfort amongst them." A bowl of water was held before her and she washed her hands. Her eyes alighted on Holly. "Have you drunk wine before?" 

She shook her head and jumped as the servant carrying the water bowl appeared silently at her elbow. She washed too, ignoring Morgan's smirk, and met Karn's encouraging smile. In the brazier the wood shifted, letting out a stream of orange sparks and wafting smoke in their direction.

"I have been considering your unique talent," Morgan announced, when Holly's cup had been filled and she was discovering the taste of wine to be delicious and rather stronger than ale or cider. "I collect these little anomalies, you know. A magpie's habit, hoarding titbits, but there you are. I once found met a man who could calm wild horses and another whose song would bring swans down to paddle before him. Perhaps something in the voice, or maybe more subtle. You're lucky you have it, whatever it is. Karn slaughtered a whole troop of Imperial soldiers while in Ravenna, didn't you, my leopard?"

"Is there something you want of her?" Karn asked suddenly, interrupting.

Morgan smiled back. "Nothing at present, you may be sure. But I'm rarely wrong when it comes to knowing what I will need one day. Your own birth, my scowling daughter, for one. My chalice you so kindly fetched for another." She settled back. "What do you know of the future, Karn?"

The way they were placed Holly could not see Karn's eyes unless she leaned her head back to look at her especially, so she could not catch the expression there. Instead she watched the back three quarters of her head tilt in confusion. She framed a question, but at that instant a trio of servants arrived with food and Morgan waved her down.

Dinner at Morgan's table was meat and little else despite the bakery and grain stores below, but all delicately prepared. Strange aromas came out of the dishes of duck and lamb and rabbit - spices, but not any Holly knew, and sauces based on yet more wine. The servants also brought further unfamiliarity in the form of a forked metal prong laid across Holly's bowl. She waited politely for Morgan and Karn to finish filling their bowls from the dishes and watched. It was apparently for carrying solid food without having to touch it, which was a brilliant novelty for Holly.

"The future," Morgan repeated once the servants were one more outside in the windy night. "You've read the philosophers, Karn, when you weren't getting distracted by pretty girls. Whence comes time?" She speared and tore from a pile of pigeon.

"From the turning of the sphere of the fixed stars," Karn said, with a tone that implied she was reciting something learned years before. She leaned back so that the folds of her clothes just brushed Holly. "They say, anyway. In the short term the wandering planets and the movement of the zodiac influence the unfolding of the year. And in the longer term the procession of the solstices. Every year the sphere of stars has turned so that the sun rises in midsummer a little further on in the zodiac. And this changes the influences of the heavens that prevail on each year. And so unfolds history."

"And if a sphere is turned, it eventually returns where it began?" Morgan was not curious, merely recapitulating.

"Yes. Inevitably."

"And so we will all return," mused Morgan. "Your philosophers will teach that same doctrine in Athens once more, and the Romans will again build Londinium, and it will again fall into bloody ruins with everyone dying the same as they did before. And I will kill my own mother just as in every other time and we shall sit inevitably here in this tent drinking wine from Burdigala." She waved at a wooden case stacked at the edge of the tent. The silver chalice stood on it, glowing in the firelight. "And you will be in that moment of fury for ever more, my daughter, and she will pull you out of it."

Her eyes closed during her recitation, and Karn took the moment of being unwatched to lean back and smile at Holly. Very slowly, knowing what she was doing, Holly reached forward and placed her hand, unseen by anyone save her, gently against the small of Karn's back.

"And yet. And yet." Morgan's eyes were sparks in the growing darkness. "Still there is the struggle. The getting of power and the holding on. Always the holding on. Ah, a puzzle for the philosophers. What do you think, pretty girl?"

Holly flushed red at Morgan's question, but the wine was also making her head fuzzy. "My mother said it wasn't like that."

Morgan's face slashed open in a smile. "Oh, now? An unconventional philosopher, your mother? Was she especially learned?"

"She said the world had been created by a god. And it was only going to happen once, so we have to try as hard as we can to make it count."

"Ah. She listened to priests."

"Mother," warned Karn.

"Well, I think that's charming." Morgan said. A flash of mood passed over her face. "If unlikely." The goblet twined in her fingers and Karn shifted a little closer backwards towards Holly. "Secrets to find out, and that never comes without a cost. Daughter, when the full moon is passed we will ride out to Uricon. We'll need more people then."

Karn shifted, but nodded.

"Are you building an army?" Holly asked.

Morgan smiled indulgently. "Yes, little one. Bit by bit I put my waifs and strays to use. Not you," she added to a motion from Karn. "You have your own, special uses. I do hope you will be of satisfaction to Karn."

In the silence that fell, Karn folded her arm behind her back and took Holly's hand in hers. Her hand was cool. 

"So you don't know what it's for?" she asked. "The chalice?"

"Oh, it has its immediate uses even now. I can see people far and near reflected in the water, and lay out libations of more than usual power, and brew potions to speak to the dead. But there is something more I have not seen, that it is waiting for." She pursed her lips. "I have seen my own face in it, which gives me pause. And there is a sword also."

"A sword?"

"Yes. And a book, even further off. And something else besides which I am not permitted to find."

* * *

Carmilla lay with one cheek against Laura's chest, listening to her heart beating. Regular, repetitive, comforting. Now and again Laura turned a page and there was a rustling in her other ear. She liked times like this when her world had shrunk to the size of Laura's lap. She could be at home here.

And quiet. Sounds arose when she was still that couldn't be heard any other time. She would do this at night sometimes when lying awake - not the anxious irritable reaching after sleep kind of awake, but the calm, accepting kind that was somehow more restful than unconsciousness. Her mind would go reaching out after the breathing of Laura next to her, out to the wind in the trees and on the hillside, to the muffled owls and foxes further out. She would listen to the settling of the house in the night and even imagine that she caught the scurrying of insects burrowing into the beams and the slow pulsing of water in the rock below. Eventually she would listen so hard that she fell into dreams almost convinced that she was hearing the turning of the stars.

The day was louder and it took longer. There were birds in the sky outside and if you weren't still for whole minutes of hardly breathing you wouldn't hear them. The slow dripping of water from gutters now that the morning's rain was over. She heard her own heartbeat fall briefly into line with Laura's and then move on - Carmilla's always beat faster. Upstairs there was the distant thrumming of the boiler which ran downstairs through the beams framing the front door. Slowly she expanded her mind and wore the house like skin.

In her imagination she found the hidden recesses and the layers. Her soul went prying through the cellar and brushed away layers of dust. Woodlice and centipedes and other nameless scurrying creatures skittered away from her questing mind. She found the places that were floored over and the pits that had been filled when the house was built. Down below into the gravel and the rock she dug up the corpses of mole and badger. An ancient brooch lay undisturbed amid a layer of ash, a lock of incorruptible bright hair threaded through it still. Down into the cold water flowing through the joints of the place, gargling out into the mouth of the spring where two girls in long dresses, one in a green coat, stooped to cup water in their hands and stare into the pool after the momentary emergence of Carmilla's face.

And up she drifted again through the air to the house again, the gentle grinding of the rock being eroded away in her half-dreaming ears. She came up through the floor and rose to the eaves, reaching her hands out the gables. She felt the rooms like familiar weights passed from one hand to another. The green guest room that she was slowly learning to think of as 'our room', spread with the detritus of a life together. The silver chalice that was now adopted as their personal heirloom stood on the bedside table, waiting for evening when they would take off their matching rings and place them inside again for safekeeping during the night.

At one side - Laura's side, because she had firm opinions about that - the sword from the attic rested against the wall, point down. There was something about a sword that stopped you putting it down. It was like the urge to pick up a stick when walking and carry it along, thrashing at hemlock stems for no reason.

Her mind circled around the other rooms. She paid little attention to the red guest room or to the bathroom and shied away from the locked and ignored room that had once belonged to her mother, but her soul loitered at the entrance of her own old bedroom for a while, uncertain. She touched the door, listening for the feel of the wood on her imagination.

There was an answering pressure.

That almost recalled her to her real body down in the living room and her real hands there, but curiosity spurred her to meet the other presence. It mirrored her, crouching behind the door. There was resistance. She could not enter this room that was hers from childhood. She frowned, and really did frown, so that Laura looking down at her girlfriend from her book thought she had drifted into worrisome dreams and brushed a lock of hair out of her face in silent comfort.

She knocked. Instantly she was aware that Laura had jumped at the sound. Unsure, feeling herself in a place she had not been to before, she knocked again and felt Laura disturb her rest as she sat up taller.

"Cupcake?" she asked muzzily.

Laura was sitting up straight and looking confused as Carmilla arose from her lap. "I thought I heard someone knocking," she said. She stood up and leaned out to where the bay window overlooked the front door. "Nobody there."

A knock sounded again, and it was obvious to both of them that it came from above. To Carmilla's sensitive ears still not quite withdrawn from her psychic wandering there was a moment when she could not place the position of the knocking - inside or outside of the old bedroom? - but this question was pushed out of her mind by the knowledge that it was certainly outside of her head.

"Is there someone up there?" Laura whispered.

"A bird?" she guessed, her ideas returning to the world of flesh and blood. "Flew into the window?"

Again the knocking, three times in succession, and then it wasn't knocking any more because it started on the walls of the room upstairs. Even Laura could hear that well to know that it came from inside, palms or fists pounding on walls, moving around, punching out from some hidden place.

The two girls stood up and, of one accord, edged to the kitchen where there were knives and rolling pins. The kitchen was directly below Carmilla's old room and up above the ceiling was the unmistakeable sound of someone moving around, tramping heavy footsteps into the floor. The beams creaked as they shuffled. They scurried, stamped, scratched at the walls and as Laura's terrified eyes met Carmilla's the whole of the upstairs of Silas House erupted into a frenzy, a frenzy of a mad thing lashing out, the anger and panic and chaos of something terrified and furious that had found itself disturbed and thrust into the world once more.

* * *

Cornelius Hans Albrecht, Lugenbaron von Vordenberg, Ritter of the Thiepwald, Laird of Upper Lower Selkirkshire (by purchase) and Knight Grand Cross of various continental orders that nobody had ever heard of or was able to ascertain the actual existence of was proving to be a man as dull as his name was long. Elle watched in a sort of morbid fascination as he raised his teacup, lowered it a little, raised it a little further, decided to dab at his upper lip, thought of something to say, put the cup down down, forgot what he was saying and finally took a sip. This was the third cup of tea so far and it had been a long afternoon. On the other side of the table, Mircalla was suffering as badly. She gazed at the cake fork with the eyes of one considering a mortal sin. Lilita seemed to be perversely enjoying herself.

Vordenberg nodded at the sabre on the wall with its embossed leather scabbard and twine of yellow braid. "A fine weapon, Madam. Yes, most fine indeed. It is an heirloom of some sort, I take it?"

"My late husband's sword," Lilita said, as she extended a hand to wrench Mircalla into a more suitably upright sitting position. "He was a Major in the Yeomanry, you know. Strictly ceremonial, of course."

"Ah, the old champagne-opener, then? You know, when I was in the Prussian cavalry, we had a man who could-"

Mircalla's attention faded out, although the twinge in her collarbone from having her posture sharply adjusted lingered longer. Her mother was giving every evidence of being deeply enthralled by Vordenberg's chronologically impossible stories. By her own rough calculation, the man was claiming to have simultaneously fought on two sides of the Baden Revolution and also in the Vienna Uprising at the same time, suggesting that he was probably a somewhat faster walker in 1848 than in the present day.

"- three bottles and ride thirty miles and, ahem, entertain three ladies before-"

It all faded into a haze. Eventually Elle returned to earth with the realisation that Vordenberg had stopped talking some while ago and Lilita had taken over the task.

"... so I thought Antwerp in the spring for us, and then through low Germany into Saxony. Mircalla will love it - she's one for Goethe, you know. Isn't that right, dear?"

"Yes Mother. That would be delightful." She stared straight ahead and avoided Elle's eyes.

"Perhaps we'll acquire a guide and go walking in the Black Forest on the way back. She's a very healthy girl, Mircalla, although you wouldn't think it to look at her, so pale. Never happier than when she's wearing herself out and then sleeping peacefully. Vigorous aren't you, my dove?" Mircalla nodded wordlessly. It was beginning to frustrate Elle, her endless quiet acquiescence. _Why do you not shout and scream?_ she wanted to know. _You do it in the city all the time_. "She'll make a good wife one of these days."

"And when will that be?" Elle asked, hardly aware that it was coming out of her mouth. She flushed, but nobody save Mircalla seemed to have picked up on her anger.

Lilita gazed at her so steadily she almost looked through her. "When we have someone suitable. Mircalla is used to the comfort and security of a moneyed home. It would never do for her to cast it aside. Would it, my little kaiseren?"

"Oh, I wouldn't mind," Mircalla managed. "For the right person."

"Oh, you would mind. You would. I see it." Lilita cocked her head and considered Elle. "You've never lived outside of genteel society and you hardly know what it does to smooth one's way. And membership is not bought for nothing. We must all pay our dues: good marriages, suitable pastimes, respectable professions for the men. They are the subscriptions, the membership fees. The tithes that provide your beloved little apartment in the city and trips to the theatre. Oh, but speaking of duties to be paid - Baron, if you will excuse me for a moment I have quite forgot some domestic matters that need my attention. Preparations for a little dinner next week. Mircalla, you must come help me choose the menu. Perry will need it tonight if she is to lay in orders and you know what the fashions are in London. Elle will be able to keep our guest entertained while we work."

She got up and Mircalla, with an apologetic look at Elle, abandoned her to Vordenberg and followed her mother's heels out. There was a silence that grew and gave birth to new silences. The sound of Vordenberg slurping his tea was enough to make even an exhausted girl prefer his conversation.

"What are you doing in your retirement, Herr Baron?" she asked when it was all too unbearable. "Now that you're not fighting in revolutions."

"Ah, study, study. The improvement of the mind and the widening of the horizons, you know. The gifts reserved for old age." He smiled beneficently at her from his unassailable self-confidence. "The matters of the past concern me most, as it happens. When one has seen so much of history - made a little mark of one's own, you know - one tries to understand the great tides in which we, the little fishes, find ourselves swimming."

"You're an... antiquarian?" she guessed.

"Ah." Vordenberg gave a dismissive wave as if to offset his no doubt imposing reputation in the eyes of this terribly impressionable young girl. "I dabble, I dabble. Merely a hobby for my autumn years. I did some digging down in Silas Wood only last year, you know. Now what do you imagine I found there?" He leaned forward in the manner of one proffering a treat.

Elle deliberately widened her eyes and looked starstruck. "I can't imagine. A golden crown? A chest of Spanish doubloons?"

He made something which was probably meant to be a chuckle. "Ah, no no, tres charmant young lady. And I would not have you imagine that we antiquarians are interested simply in wealth! It is the knowledge of the past we seek, not our own mere enrichment. I found some bits of rusted metal, nothing more valuable than that." A spark of annoyance appeared on his face. "And I did not make up stories about skeletons and silverware, unlike _certain_ previous excavators in this district."

"Silverware?" asked Elle, and then: "Skeletons?" She tried to catch Mircalla's eye from across the room where she was offering single word responses to her mother's questions on the matter of whether duck was fashionable at the moment, but she did not see. But Elle's remark was evidently the wrong thing to say to Vordenberg. He looked affronted.

"Oh, if you believe that old liar Callis," he sneered. "Before I bought the wood off him, he said he'd turned up a silver chalice and a skeleton in that old spring and fountain. Of course I asked him where they were now and he said he'd given the chalice to a beautiful lady but discretion forbade him to say who. Pah! A liar and a cad."

Elle put two and two together and promptly buried the conclusion under the best face of innocence she could manage. "What a pity. I should have loved to see real treasure. And the skeleton? Was that real?"

"Some collector of these things in Church Stretton named Armitage bought it, he says. I know that man and I have long abandoned speaking to him. We do not see eye to eye. He insists on cataloguing everything and applying natural philosophy! As if one can do that to the human world. Also he even talks of opening a museum for the education of the peasants! Such ideas. The Britisher peasants are even more superstitious than those home in Styria, which I would have reckoned impossible. One of my maids swore she saw a ghost in the garden just last week - when the housekeeper was hanging out the white linens!"

"Do you not believe in ghosts?"

"Ghosts, dear girl? The spirits of the departed? Ach! No. This is a modern, scientific age."

"But that's exactly why we should investigate! There are modern ways to-" she broke off from her prepared rant, remembering that this was not a supercilious young man in a cafe or some new arrival at Lady Belmonde's salon.

Vordenberg was looking at her with the most thought he had put into anything all night. "My dear, you have some knowledge of these matters! I confess ignorance, but..." he darted a look to where Lilita was still out of earshot. "I am not sure our gracious host would approve. You must, ahem, 'keep mum', ja?"

She gave him the benefit of the language gap. "...yes."

"So." He leaned conspiratorially in. "Modern investigation of spirits. Tell me what they do in London, these spiritualists. Have you had any experience in this area?"

* * *

It was on the tip of Holly's mind as she walked through the camp. There was something she had not put together, like letters written on a messed tablet so that she could see the traces of a message but not understand it. She tried to clear her mind, but it slipped out of her grasp. She gave up and went to look for Karn, who had not been in the tent when she awoke from a nap.

Her head was still groggy and she tried to count up how much sleep she must have missed over the previous months. More than could be made up after one good night and an hour with her head down, listening to Karn breathing steadily in the next bed. The question arose of how long she would be here - Morgan looked unlikely to want people leaving. This camp in the western hills could hardly be a secret, but it was not shouting out its presence either. But then where would she go if she left?

And then there was Karn who needed considering. Holly did not know _how_ to take account of her, only that for some reason she must. If Karn was prone to these rages, and if she was a danger to herself and others, was it right to leave her? And, come to that, was it safe to do so? If nothing else, the four days with her so far had given ample reason not to want to be wandering the wild with anything less than an axe-armed companion, whatever else she might be to Holly.

At the bottom of the hill she wound her way along the muddy trail into the camp. The sound of wood and metal came from the far side, out by where the horses were pastured and the blacksmith with his sharpening wheel was. As she came to the edge she found the source of the noise.

Karn was sparring with the tall woman who had brought Holly into the camp. She was well over a foot taller than Karn, but the two of them were well matched. She fought with a long spear in one hand, a spool of leather tied around the blade, and a shield on her other arm. Karn had only her hand axe with the head covered in a roll of cloth. Even so it was a difficult match for the spearwoman. Karn moved fast, and she had a way of hooking the axe head behind the woman's shield to throw it away and keep her off balance. A few people had gathered around to watch and both seemed to have supporters.

A gasp went through the watchers as Karn slipped, went falling down on her back but somehow turned it into a sideways attack on the spearwoman's legs. They were both down on the ground for a moment and scrambled up laughing. Karn made an ironic bow. On the other side of them, a man pulled a copper piece out of his pocket and waved it at his companion, who nodded and did the same.

"Little axe lady will win."

Holly turned to find the baker's boy next to her. He wide open face looked enthralled. She turned back to the fight and pretended to appraise it. "I agree."

"You were travelling with her, right? I heard someone say she killed five men at once."

News obviously got around. "Yes. It wasn't very nice." In front of them the bloodless fight went on. The spearwoman missed a lunge and Karn was on her in an instant, a ripple of strokes coming from each side in succession. The woman gave ground before her.

"Can't have been." The boy grinned down at Holly. "This is a weird place where the women can fight like that and the red lady collects lost people. Can't say I'm complaining." He looked genuinely pleased to be in such an unusual situation.

"Collects people?" she asked absently, noting with displeasure the large purple bruise standing out on Karn's bared left arm.

"I mean, you know. She came through the inn where I was making do after the old fellow died and said I should come because I made good bread. Well I was excited! But she hardly eats it, she just likes meat and wine. Maybe she just felt sorry for me, but I didn't want to rock the boat by asking, you know?" He shrugged. "There's a few of us she found like that. Some of the girls over that side of the camp, they came from Elmet. And there's a girl from Ireland too." 

She looked up at his open and honest face and wondered how she had got so cynical as to think of it that way. "You said something like that before. B- oh!" Holly let out a cry as the spearwoman made a desperate lunge and her blunted spear glanced off Karn's right side. She jumped back. Holly bit the inside of her cheek.

"Oh, get her!" someone shouted suddenly and Karn did something complicated that hooked the spear out of her opponent's hand and sent it flying off several yards. She reversed her stroke and flung it into the inside of the shield so that the woman was wrenched sideways and flung at her feet. 

There was a round of clapping and some coins changed hands. Karn helped her fallen opponent to her feet.

"Next time, right." They clapped each other on the back and Karn loped out of the circle to where Holly waited. She was bringing herself up a little short when her tread shifted her weight to her bruised right side.

"You're hurt, it looks like you're hurt, are you hurt?" Holly burst out.

Karn waved the concern away, but still allowed Holly to offer her some support. "It's a bruise. I could do with a bit of water." They climbed the hill from the lower camp up to the shelf where their tent was. Morgan was nowhere to be seen. Where did she go when she wasn't towering over her domain, Holly wondered.

Karn's arm over her shoulder put no weight on Holly's shoulders, but neither of them hurried to step away from the other. In the tent Karn sat down on the nearest bed and pulled up her jerkin to inspect the damage to her side. Holly hovered above her and worried. There was a bruise starting to form on her pale skin but it wasn't serious. She seemed satisfied. Holly felt tight in her chest at the dark stain against the pattern of ribs.

"Your arm too. Do you want water?"

The arm was grazed. Her jerkin was without sleeves and the spearpole had skinned a patch as it glanced her, but there was no blood. She poked it experimentally, but she wasn't paying attention. Her eyes kept flicked up to where Holly stood over her.

"No." She stood up suddenly and Holly was again conscious that for all Karn's formidableness they were almost the same height. "Don't bother. I don't want it."

They were very close and Holly could feel her closeness as a physical presence that pushed on her. "Do you want-"

"Yes." She leaned forward and kissed her.

* * *

Elle glanced sideways at Mircalla as they lay on a picnic blanket in the woods for the second day running. She was uncomfortable and her clothes didn't feel like they fitted properly. An itch at the base of her spine. She got her nerve up.

"'Calla, who was Betty Spielsdorf?"

She could see the tension shoot through Mircalla all at once. Every inch of skin tightened. Mircalla's leg thrown over her seized up. Obviously there was no pretending after that, so she threw herself further in. "I heard the maids talking about her. And about Mel," she added, without mentioning that she had deliberately questioned Sarah-Jane about the latter. "The friend your mother mentioned."

Mircalla was a long time in answering and she never met Elle's eyes, not for a moment. "They were my friends," she said eventually. Quietly, evasively, confirming only what had already been spoken aloud.

"They were more than friends, weren't they?" Elle touched her unresponsive cheek and found it cold. "I don't mind, you know. I'm not jealous. I told you all about Danielle, remember?"

But Mircalla's voice continued tight. "What were the maids saying?"

Around them the particular silence of the autumn wood was filling up more and more of the conversation. Leaves fell and settled between sentences. "They were just saying Betty had gone away. To Austria, I think it was." Feeling unworthy even as she did it but needing to know how Mircalla would respond, she dissembled. "I suppose she had family there? They said her father was a general in the Imperial army."

A gust of wind snuck it way into the wood and shook the brambles. "Yes," Mircalla breathed, so quiet that Elle had to strain to hear her. "Yes, she was Austrian. We were... friends for a while. I've not seen her for a long time, though."

She felt the ice under the words - thin, cracking, with Mircalla's past and secrets underneath it ready to swallow her. "How did it end, between you?"

"It doesn't matter."

"All right." The worry was niggling at her now, a little worm ate its way even further into parts of her heart that had seemed pristine. "And Mel?"

"Nothing to tell, cupcake. Nothing happened. You heard mother, she fell ill." 

It was a lie. It was definitely a lie. Not an evasion, not a brief untruth to smooth things over, but a total lie. Mircalla had never lied to her before - no, said the anxious internal voice, Elle had never _known_ Mircalla to lie to her. And if it had not been for the things that Lilita and Sarah-Jane had let slip, she would not have known it now. Mircalla was staring up at the sky and her profile suddenly looked like that of a stranger. Elle let it fade and tried to summon up happier thoughts, but they were all very far away. 

Their apartment in London where everything between them had been so easy was now somehow inaccessible. Lilita's house was showing a new side of Mircalla, one who had secrets, one about whom people told stories. She pulled herself closer and cuddled in against Mircalla's side to try to bring her closer. Her stomach was tight. "Hey, Mircalla?"

"Yes?"

"Can we pretend that if I asked, we'd go? We'd leave this place and your mother and go home and nothing would ever trouble us again?"

"That would be nice." She sighed and there was the briefest of moments when they could so pretend and so Elle did. "But then we'd just be two runaway girls for the world to eat up."

"So what? If I were with you-"

"Everything depends on my mother. You know that. She controls my allowance, she's my legal guardian." It all sounded to Elle like her repeating the kind of things Lilita said, her mother's words drilled into her for so long that they were coming out of her mouth. "If I upset her we're finished. I'll be packed off somewhere I'll never see the light of day again. You know the kind of coffins they send girls like us to."

Convents in Austria, thought Elle, where Elisabeth Spielsdorf says her orisons every morning for years and years and years until she dies. Stern gritstone sanatoriums on the moors like the one Melanippe Callis had been buried in. Where, if anyone had tried to save them, they had failed.

Had Mircalla even tried?

"To Hell with her," she suggested. "To Hell with your mother. Let's see. I can type and write shorthand. You can learn that too, I'll teach you. You can speak French and I can learn that. We could get on a train and be at Dover before she notices we've gone. We'll be in Paris by Friday and we'll find work. Just us and a shoddy apartment. Free. None of this hiding, we'd face life head on and fight it. I'd fight anyone who tried to take you away."

Mircalla almost laughed, but there was no joy in it. "She'd find us. She finds everyone. There's no fighting, there's no standing up. There's only hiding."

"And if we're found?"

Above them a gaggle of crows alighted in the upper branches and commenced a quarrel. Elle counted: seven. 

"Let's not be found. Don't rock the boat, cupcake."

* * *

"Tell me, Elle. Do you think it is murder to stand by as somebody is killed?"

Elle stared at Lilita, but she was still waiting for an answer. "No. No, of course not. It's only murder if you kill them."

"So if I were to stab Perry one evening and you sat there and did nothing, that would be no sin?" Her voice was purely conversational, as if they were discussing flower arrangements or the best way to unpick a cross-stitch.

"Of course it would! If I could have stopped you and I didn't - well." She spread her hands over her open book. In the grate the fire crackled and where Mircalla had got to she did not know.

"Yes indeed. Death by negligence. The maxim of the law is _silence gives consent_ , you know." She sighed. "It pains me to speak ill of my daughter, but there are times when I wonder if she stands by silently too often. One should not interfere too much in the life of one's children when they are grown, of course. But did you ever hear the name _Betty Spielsdorf_?"

"... I did." Elle tried to catch some expression in Lilita's face as she went on impassively knitting. There was nothing in her manner to suggest she was trying to trick her.

"Do you know what happened to her?"

"She went to a convent in Austria. That's what Sarah-Jane said."

"Yes, in picturesque Styria - though I can't imagine she ever sees much of the country. She's in the strictest of enclosed orders. She went there, my little dove, because her father heard some ugly stories about what she got up to in private while he was away and she had a summer during which to invite her own guests. I shan't disturb you with what those stories were, little innocent. But I did hear from a certain person that Mircalla was able to provide sweet Betty with an alibi and did not do so. She wanted to avoid suspicion herself, you see. Now what do you think of that?"

Elle stared at her hands. "I don't think anything of that."

"No? Hmm." Lilita continued her knitting for a while and started again. "And Melanippe Callis. Now I know you've heard that name, I've mentioned her myself. And I know for an actual fact that she was quite preparing to take ship for America a whole week before her father made arrangements with certain doctors. She was practically packed! But Mircalla wouldn't make up her mind to come with her and so she delayed and delayed until it was too late. Too afraid of the consequences, you see? And so poor Melanippe rots in a hellhole on the moors of Allendale."

"Why-"

"You're her friend, are you not? You should know these things. Before you put too much trust in one person. Before you do anything stupid that might get you hurt."

There was a subtle creaking in the corridor outside, a movement under the crack under the door, the sense of people standing right outside the drawing room and not coming in.

"Mrs-"

"Call me Lilita, dear. We should probably put pleasantries to one side." She put down her knitting and leaned closer. "I know you're my daughter's lover, pet. I knew it from the moment she asked to bring you. Now ask yourself something: if I knew that, and she has known me for twenty-one years, why did she still bring you?"

The breath caught in Elle's throat.

Lilita smiled grimly. "She doesn't care, little one. Not for you, not for Betty, nor for Melanippe. Not even for me as she should - but still I am her mother and there's something there. No, she got what she wanted out of you and if you get thrown on the rubbish heap she can always find more. Very soon, she will ask you to do something for her. That thing will be the death of you. I ask you to think of yourself and not to put yourself in danger for her sake when she won't do it for you. She's a monster, my dear. I know it's harsh for a mother to say but she is. She's led you astray." Lilita sighed. "I won't pretend I approve of what you are, Elle, but I know you have a good heart and you think you've found love. You haven't. She'll claw out your eyes if you hold on too close, she'll rip you to shreds. She's a wild animal and you just haven't seen her change yet.

"I don't believe it."

"You do. Or you're starting to. Let go of her, before you get hurt. Now." She turned to the door and clapped her hands. "William!"

* * *

Carmilla's old room was down at the end of the upstairs corridor with a small window set under an overhanging gable. Everything was quiet now, the attack having ceased the moment the girls had stepped onto the stairs, but they went carefully nonetheless and had stopped off for weaponry in case of mundane terrors. The bedroom door was stiff against the uneven floorboards which warped and bent across the level of the threshold. Carmilla gave it a short sharp shock and it swung loose to give her sword-wielding entrance. 

There was nobody inside, but there was a lot of stuff.

"Um... Carm?" Laura ventured. "I wouldn't have called you the tidiest person, but wow."

It was not a big room, but every possible surface was occupied by something. There were CDs in heaps, bearing the indecipherable logos of metal bands (Bones of Sartre, Laura noticed, had been a particular favourite of the teenage Carmilla). T-shirts, baggy ripped jeans. Large posters of the kind of paintings used on the covers of Gothic novels along with several of dark-eyed women glowering in states of artful undress. Books fallen off the shelves and with loose pages. Something about it was unsettling beyond the normal teenage chaos, though. Laura trod carefully between Grimm's Fairy Tales and something about witches. She turned over a battered volume entitled _Tales of Enchantment and Transformation_.

Carmilla shook her head and took a step back. "Creampuff. This isn't me."

"What?"

"Uh, I left home ten years ago? Mother died seven years ago. I know the caretaker only comes up once every few months, but - really?"

A noticed but unexamined fact swam into view. "No dust," Laura realised. "None of this is dusty. It's like you never left. That's... that's not right." She pushed a mesh top aside and sat down on the creaking bed. Carmilla still did not enter, but stood at the doorway holding the salvaged sword like a comfort blanket.

"I know she kept it for a year at least. I got the letters - I was still reading them, that first year before I met you - about how everything was still here and I could come back whenever I wanted. No strings attached."

"But you didn't. Not even for a day?"

"If I came for a day I'd have been years older by the time I got out. No, I knew perfectly well that there were strings and what they were." She sighed and managed to make it over the threshold. There was a small window at one end, sticking out under the gable, and she tiptoed over debris to peer out of it. "I think she let people accidentally come in sometimes. _This is my daughter Carmilla's room_ " she mimicked. "she's away at the moment but she'll be back before long. Such a mess she makes, but she's a dutiful daughter really. She'll be so sorry she missed you."

"But after she died-"

"After we killed her," Carmilla emphasised. She had been suddenly doing that, Laura realised. Before the incident with the mirror the other day they hadn't spoken of her mother's death for so long, but now she stressed the killing as if it were more final. "Yes. After we killed her I refused to come back. The lawyers organised a caretaker to come until I wanted to do something with this place. The rest of the house is tidy, right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, even the cupboards were swept out. And they must have been in here. To vacuum." Laura poked experimentally at the bed. The covers were old and the sheets yellowed, but it didn't look or smell like something left gathering filth for years. It felt like old stuff got out of a closet for a long-awaited guest. She picked up _Tales of Enchantment and Transformation_ and turned the dog-eared pages. It looked like it had been a favourite. On the inside cover was written _Carmilla Karnstein 2001_ and below it the usual doodles of distracted teenagers - zig-zags, swirly trees, spirals.

"That was one of my favourites," she said. "That and _Red Shift_." She picked a few more books off the floor. "I can't think why I left that one. I could only take a few to university when I went, but still. She stacked the green-covered editions of _Choephoroi_ and _Eumenides_ from her Greek lessons on top of a cheap paperback of _The Owl Service_ and two volumes of Collette with their covers replaced by coloured paper to obscure them. Her fingers traced the window frame. "This is new," she said. "Look at this." There were marks on the frame, bits of wood forcibly flaked off as if shaved with a penknife or prised out by a claw. The exposed wood was pale and clean. Their eyes met.

"Wardrobe," they decided together. Laura spotted a hockey stick lying in a pile of old school clothes and hefted it to match Carmilla's swordplay. There was nothing in the wardrobe when they opened it, but she kept hold of it nonetheless.

She poked the backboard in case something were behind it. "This is an urban legend, right? I've read creepy stories on the internet about this. A man left his webcam on at night and the next day saw the video of a girl wandering around his apartment. Turns out she'd been living behind a secret panel..."

"Thank you, cupcake. Thank you so very much for that image." She kicked a pair of scuffed combat boots thoughtfully and peered into the empty wardrobe. She tried a few cupboards. "Empty. All of them. Laura, you've lived with me for the best part of a decade. Where do I leave clothes?"

"Everywhere. Absolutely everywhere and if I didn't love you, you _would_ be dead."

"I'd like to see you try, darling." She had got hold of an idea but wasn't getting right to the point. "And you've seen crime scenes. From burglaries and stuff. Does this look more like a messy student or more like a burglary?"

"Burglary," Laura realised. It wasn't a mess at all - simply, everything had been dumped from the cupboards onto the floor. It was a systematic emptying out of every possible hiding place. "I'll call the police."

Carmilla steadied herself on the wall. "No, don't. That won't do any good."

"What?"

"She's looking for me."

"Carm."

"She is. She was in the mirror and then she went to my room." Carmilla's hand had got hold of her sleeve and was plucking at a frayed edge. 

Laura picked her way across the floor, meaning to wrap herself around her girlfriend. But between the discarded pile of jeans with chains hanging from the belt loops and the Latin grammar was something with handwriting that wasn't Carmilla's. It caught her eye and she picked it up. 

A recordable DVD, lying on its own without a sleeve or case and with a handwritten label. Red ink: _Welcome home, darling_.

* * *

Holly woke slowly and moved as little as possible. For a long while she opened her eyes only wide enough to see the contours of Karn's bare shoulder on the bed next to her. She was warm and comfortable and she let the sensations of the morning seep into her slowly one by one. Their tangled legs below the blankets. The delicious gentle aching in some of her more tired muscles.

From down the hill floated the sounds of wood chopping and hammering. It sounded like construction going on, for whatever Morgan was planning for the day after tomorrow.

"What's your mother doing at the full moon?" Holly wondered, not for the first time.

"I don't know." Karn rolled a little further in and pressed her lips to Holly's collarbone. She moved downwards.

"You must know _something_. You do all her errands for her. And if we're going to Uricon to recruit after the ritual or whatever it is - she must be getting ambitious." Karn made a wordless grunt that was neither agreement nor disagreement, but which suggested that speculation was not what she wanted to be doing at the moment. "Bit of an odd place to go if the war goes the way you think it will. Won't all the soldiers have gone south? That's where I'd hire troops if I needed them - out of the remains of a defeated army. To the left a bit," she added to Karn's moving kisses. "Ooh, yes, there."

"Ours not to reason why." Her head dipped down.

"It's not like it can be easy... to feed..." her voice tailed off as facts rose to prominence. "The red colour and the crow banner, Karn. Why do only the soldiers and the older servants wear them?"

Karn looked up in exasperation from halfway through her journey downwards across Holly's stomach. "Are you always this absent, sweetheart? I'm doing a job here for your attention."

"But the red and the banner is Morgan's sign?"

"Yes."

"And she collects people but doesn't have them wear her sign. No, Karn, stop." She grabbed hold, gently, of Karn's head before it could get any further and drive the oncoming through from her head. "And she has a use for them, but it's not what she told them. The baker boy, he wasn't needed for baking. So for what?"

"Love." Karn sat upright and looked her seriously in the face. "Don't. The ways of my mother are subtle and dangerous. Nothing good can come of meddling them."

"I'm not prying." She sighed and giggled. "All right, I'm prying a bit. But you have to admit, it looks pretty weird. Gods, you're beautiful. I didn't notice that at first." She watched contentedly as Karn lowered herself again to resume her slow approach. There were scars even on her shoulder blades, Holly noticed, stripes that looked like rope burns or places where the skin had been torn away and grown back.

A word reared its shocking head and she shied away from it for a moment. "Replacement," she breathed when it would not leave her alone, and Karn sighed at her tenacity. "Replacement. That's why you recruit more people, to replace losses. And she's not recruiting soldiers because otherwise she'd go south." She was conscious that Karn's lips moving over her hip bone had frozen but she didn't respond to that. "And... she was telling you I wouldn't be needed and you were scared of that."

Karn sat up again and placed a hand lightly on her breastbone as if to restrain her. "Don't. Love, don't."

Horror. It was too horrible.

"She's killing them. They're all going to die. They're expendable." At once she knew it was true and she scrambled up, pushing Karn's hand away. The next realisation came in with as much weight, and closer to come. "And you knew." She saw it in Karn's eyes and felt sick. "You knew. You knew what your mother was planning."

"Not exac-" she started, but Holly batted away the hand trying to touch her cheek.

"What?"

"Holly, I-"

"Don't. Shut up." She took a breath. "Just answer. Did you know what Morgan was planning?"

"Sort of."

"Sort of. What the _fuck_ does that mean, Karn?"

Karn folded herself up. She clutched her own limbs now that Holly's were drawn away from her. "I didn't know that's what she was planning this time. But she's... she's used blood sacrifice before. I thought she might be planning to do... something..." she tailed off and shifted, not looking Holly in the eye.

"And that's why you didn't want me to come here. You were all right with it if the servant girls and the baker get slaughtered, but heaven forbid someone you- fuck, Karn, was that it? Heaven forbid someone you wanted to _fuck_ got hurt." She was shouting, she realised suddenly, and hushed her voice.

"It's not- it's not like that," Karn protested. "You, I really do-"

"I don't care." Holly threw herself out of bed and began throwing on clothes as fast as she could. Shift, dress, her green cloak, her boots. Karn tried to touch her, tried to hold her back, but she shook her hands off. "How could you? How could you lie there and be like that with me when you know what's going to happen? What- oh gods, you've helped her before? Have you, Karn? Have you helped her?"

Her face said everything. She took refuge in bitterness, the sharpness that had left her voice days before was now back. "Grow up, sweetheart. Like you have any idea what this world has been like. Like you have any right to judge me. You're a child. And you have no idea what it takes to survive in a world that chews us up."

The words were a slap and she snapped back. "We're done, Karn."

* * *

There was no Elle in the parlour when she came down. Mircalla looked around in confusion at Lilita standing leaning on the mantlepiece. She spared her daughter a single glance before checking out of the drawn curtains and pushing past her to shut the door. The exits all blocked, she finally faced her.

"Well. We are the two of us assembled. Let's bring this little charade to a close, shall we?" She edged closer and Mircalla recoiled.

"What is this?"

"My darling." Lilita stroked her cheek and Mircalla shivered. "This is for your own good. Your little dalliance with Betty Spielsdorf was one thing and I forgave you for it - not that you ever showed any gratitude for my doing so, my little kitten. We all have these little phases when we're young and they're not worth causing scandal for. But I must confess I did not realise how deeply you had strayed until you started..." she made a face, "started again with that Melanippe. After _that_ disgusting spectacle I hoped the city might knock some sense into you and force you to enter _decent_ society. But I was wrong. Here we are and you've yet another little paramour."

Mircalla flinched. "Elle's my companion for my safety, mother, you said so yourself-"

"Yes." She grimaced. "I did say that, didn't I? Just as I said I General Spielsdorf had revealed no more to me than he had to the world. And just as I kept Mr Callis' confidences about his own daughter to myself. You never were very quick on the uptake were you my kitten? If I'd taken you in hand that day I found you sleepwalking from your whore's bed, what would I have achieved save the two of you running away? And I'd have got hold of you eventually of course but who knows what authorities I would have had to alert? The _newspapers_ these days - I could hardly have kept the story out of them." She sighed and spread her hands. "But you stayed, doing your duty for once. And I have had time to seek the advice of a couple of doctors and talk to dear Baron Vordenberg - he's our new Justice of the Peace, you know, after old Mr Bly died - and put arrangements in place."

Mircalla backed away, but there was nowhere to back away to save the fireplace. "Arrangements?" She looked to the corners of the room, to the curtains as if hoping for a rescue to be on its way.

Lilita ignored the question and retrieved from a side table a bundle of letters. She pursed her lips. "I was more right than I knew. It turns out he's had a very interesting talk with your little whore. She spilled it all out, fool that you were to have trusted her. Black magic, Mircalla. The planchette! I've heard of these things. Reverend Smalls gave me good advice as soon as I carried Vordenberg's story to him. You won't dabble in these matters again."

"She-" Mircalla did a double-take.

"Oh, did you think that secret was safe?" Lilita pouted. "She sold you out, kitty-cat. Told the Baron everything about your foolish experiments. Do you know these things are technically illegal?" Mircalla shook her head. "Oh, but they are. Not enforced often, but little Elle told a magistrate... oh, but she did. She is a selfish, callow girl. Did you not understand? She's hardly of your quality: a fine pet, but no match. At the first hint of suspicion she turned tattle-tale. I'm so sorry."

"You're not. And I don't believe it."

"You will. And I've made some decisions about your future." Mircalla looked up sharply. "You'll stay here, under supervision. You shall be confined to your room and not permitted out, except to church and to certain functions I might decide from time to time. We shall have a doctor come regularly, and a chaplain, and they will be responsible for curing you of your... depravity. If, in a year or so, they are convinced you have made sufficient progress, you will be found a suitable husband and given into his control."

Mircalla stared, her stomach twisting with fear.

"Not, alas, the promising young man I had hoped for you. It will be too difficult to explain your circumstances. He will be someone previously married and with fewer expectations but also a less active lifestyle. The Baron has kindly expressed an interest himself - but let us not get ahead of ourselves."

"I won't."

"What, dear?"

"I won't. I'm going to go now." She started for the door, but was blocked by her mother's arm.

"Darling, it's too late. The doctor is here now, waiting in the scullery, and the Baron with three footmen is outside. If you were going to run, you should have had the nerve to do it already. But I know you don't. You know, deep down, that everything I do is for the best. That everything you are depends on me. That's why you stayed."

Inside she felt the cliff crumbling, her footing failing. The rocks were below.

"Perry has gone away to London for a while. I have some furnishing plans and I wouldn't leave their arrangements to anyone who doesn't know the house. Oh, and it's Wilson's day off. And I gave Natalie and Sarah-Jane a special holiday. Fortunately the Baron was good enough to loan me some of his footmen for today."

She turned to bay. "They'll have to kill me. That will be an even bigger scandal than if I run." Anger warred with fear in her voice. "Or I'll kill myself. I won't be tidy about it."

Lilita sighed. "It's a bold idea, but you won't try it. Come here." She took Mircalla by the shoulder and steered her to the curtain windows. One of them she lifted gently aside. 

Outside the light was failing but there was enough to see by. A great coach stood there, not her mother's. And the Baron Vordenberg and three tall young men in the clothes of footmen. Between two of them, not seeing her looking back, was Elle. She was wrapped up in her green coat as if for a long journey and there were suitcases on the coach.

Lilita fastened her claws on Mircalla's shoulders. "She may have betrayed _you_ , but I know you still care for _her_. The Baron has kindly agreed to put her up for now, and tomorrow I shall send a letter to the good Doctor Hesselius. Do you know him?" She mimed surprise. "He is most experienced in cases of this kind. I believe he made the acquaintance of young Melanippe Callis only the other year. He tells me she's so much quieter these days. And he'll follow any recommendations for your little, ah, _cupcake's_ care that I give him, so you will try to behave, won't you? If you do as you're told, she could be a maid at the sanatorium and have comparative freedom. If not - well, they have some very dark, very deep cellars. Deal?"

The vomit tried to force its way up her throat but she would not give Lilita the satisfaction. It took her a long while, watching the darkness falling across Elle's face. It was ending the same way it had always ended, and there was a part of her that knew it was foolish to have hoped otherwise.

"Deal." She turned back to her mother and spoke to her from inches away. "I will hurt you for this. When she's gone and you have no hold over me-"

"It will be too late. It always is. Later than you think."

* * *

Their confidence in the matter had faded and now Laura and Carmilla were sitting around the dining room table, looking uncertainly at the disc. It formed the centrepiece to the pile of miscellania piled on the table: chalice, sword, book - the record of years circling around it.

"If it's-" Laura started, but Carmilla interrupted.

"Who else could it be?"

"Then it's old. And it's not relevant. We don't have to watch it."

"It was right there. In my room. She put it there, and I don't know whether she put it there years ago or whether she put it there just now. And you saw the state of upstairs." Carmilla eyed the doors and the windows, watching for red hair and imperious grey eyes. Outside in the garden there was a single crow hopping hopefully around but nothing more sinister.

"So we're looking at what? Since when did ghosts communicate by video tape? Couldn't they at least be modern and send something through the ether?"

"I don't think the disc is new." Carmilla turned it gently in her fingers, seeing the fading of the marker writing and the small scratches. "I think she made this a long time ago. But it's here _now_ because she wanted us to see it _now_."

Laura touched the ghost of video past gingerly and half expected there to be some reaction, like a spark of static or a resumption of the poltergeist-like assault on empty rooms. It remained quiescent. "Are you ready, then?"

"Are you?"

Laura threw up her hands to communicate the incommunicable. Of course she couldn't be. Not with something - and she wasn't jumping to conclusions right now, even though Carmilla seemed pretty clear about that _something's_ identity - trashing the house when they weren't looking. But then there was no becoming ready possible either, so now seemed as good a time as any. She leaned over and kissed Carmilla on the cheek, almost formally, as if they were preparing for battle.

They set things up, took a few breaths, steadied their heartbeats, and pressed play. The static receded and the face swum into view. Out of the corner of her eye, Laura saw Carmilla's hand tighten on the arm of the sofa.

"Hello, dear. I thought it was time we had a little talk."

Carmilla's mother was there on the screen, her deep voice as clear as if she were in the very room with them. She sat at a desk and was clearly talking to a camera carefully positioned right in front of her. It was all obviously planned. Her red hair brushed back neatly, makeup precise, earrings matching her necklace. She folded her hands in front of her, businesslike.

"You never call, you never write. You stay locked away in that mouldy old university and get up to God knows what. Although I can guess what. Your little _study buddies_ ," she sneered, "your little whores you've been attracting since school. As if any of them are ever good enough for you, my sparkling diamond."

Laura half got up to switch the naseauting display off, but Carmilla tugged her down. "No. Let me- I need to see, cupcake."

"Everything I did, I did for you. You know that, don't you? Nothing but the best for my little _kaiseren_." She pursed her lips. "Ever since your father died, I did everything for you. You know that, deep down. You're ungrateful, you've always been ungrateful, but you do know. It delights you to disappoint me.

"I had such _plans_ for you, my lamb, and you threw them all in my face one by one. University, a career - I could have arranged the perfect household for you if you'd let me. I had you lined up for Oxford - but you wouldn't have any of that, would you? It would have been so nice for you to go to my old college, so fitting, so of course you chose that pit barely worth the name instead. Such a disappointment. And _philosophy_ , when I had so _tried_ to interest you in the law."

"Delusional bitch," Carmilla hissed.

Mother's expression flickered, as if she had heard or more likely anticipated the insult. She twitched the lace at her cuffs. "And your friends! You delight in that, don't you? Carmilla? The endless parade of ghastly unsuitable companions. I took such care to introduce you to the right people - good people, from our own background. I even managed to get rid of some of the worse of your associates. But you do love to wallow in the muck to spite me. You didn't even like any of the pretty ones," she sneered. "Even after I tried, I _tried_ to find you a suitable young lady in the area. It was spite, pure spite. You would never do anything that involved staying near your mother, your own flesh and blood."

Laura shot a worried glance to the side. Carmilla's jaw was grinding her teeth. "Did she really-"

"Oh, yes. Elsie Holmwood. Dear Maman never minded me being a lesbian, but God forbid I should have anyone not chosen for me and living just down the road in easy reach."

"And why not?" asked her mother on the screen, and the two girls jumped as if the comment had been a direct response. "Are you really going to risk everything I've invested in you for - what? A teenager you've known for a month? I've seen the photos, Carmilla. I've seen you gossiping away without a thought to me watching." She waved back over her left shoulder to the bulky computer sitting on a side table - top of the range back in 2010.

Laura carefully took each of Carmilla's hands in her own and unwound the fingers that were digging into her palms. A horrible feeling was growing in her, and she knew suddenly what day the video was recorded. By her second year at university and Laura's first, Carmilla was blocking her mother's emails and ignoring letters, so neither of them had realised how much of the online progression of their relationship had been visible until she turned up one day.

"I'm coming," her mother said on the screen. "And I'm bringing you home one way or another. It doesn't matter how much you struggle or much you change or how many new lives you try and build for yourself, you won't escape the truth that's deep in your bones." She let that sink in for a moment. 

"What truth is that, Mother?" Carmilla growled at the television in the pause.

"That you _belong_ to me," she hissed back. "You belong to me, yesterday, today, tomorrow. And I demand you honour your debt."


	3. Hold

_But there is a cure in the house - and not outside_  
_Not from the hands of others but from those inside_  
_Through their blood and their struggle together._  
Aeschylus, _Choephoroi_  


"Time is a circle," Morgan said. She was lying back against the cushions in her tent that smelt of smoke and wine fumes. Karn sat at her feet staring into nothingness. "A circle endlessly repeating. In all my years and in all the years before me, there has been nothing truly new." She lolled her head back and gazed around at the walls of the tent. Her eyes were unfocused, looking beyond, and her voice came from far away. "This, all of this, is just the echoes of a choice made long ago. There is no changing it. So remember, my darling deadly girl, just whose circle you are bound in."

"Yes, Mother." Her voice was as empty as the tent she had sat in for hours alone after Holly had gone, before Morgan had summoned her to listen to her ramblings. She hoped Holly was a long way away by now.

"Do you know what the most important quality in the world is?", Morgan continued. "It's patience. Patience. Wait long enough by the river's edge and the bodies of your enemies will just float by, and I have been waiting by this river for a long, long time."

"And you call raining curses down on the whole of this island waiting?" Karn said. Morgan laughed at the jibe and swatted her head.

There was a cough at the door. One of Morgan's soldiers stood there holding her helmet in her hand and smoothing down the front of her red tunic. Morgan gestured at her to speak.

"There's a disturbance down at the camp, my lady." She glanced at Karn. "It's the, er, the holly girl."

Morgan let out a breath and fixed Karn with a look. "Ah. I was wondering why you didn't bring her today, daughter. I thought maybe you'd worn her out. Is there something you should have been telling me?"

"I thought she'd left." She said it half to Morgan and half to herself.

" _Did_ you, indeed? And you thought this would be fine by me because I am well known for letting things out my my grasp?" She passed her hand in front of her eyes and rose. "Don't answer that one. What has she done, Pell?"

"She alerted the five for the sacrifice."

"I see. Karn dearest, am I also going to have to flay you alive for telling her?"

Karn was stubborn. "She guessed."

"And stormed right out of your little love story and so you sulked rather than dealing with your own problems. Very well." She threw her red cloak over her shoulders and stretched her arms up to the tent roof. "We shall deal with the little moppet now. Are the sacrifices restrained?"

"Yes, my lady. We aren't short." Pell lifted the flap of the tent to see her out and Karn followed on the heels of Morgan. 

Down below the hill the great structure of wood was nearly finished and half-filled with brushwood and straw, but nobody was working on it. Instead they clustered at the far end. The soldiers had the place surrounded, but this was only a precaution. Morgan's followers with their red sashes and cloaks sat and watched the stand-off. Some of them - not including any of the soldiers - looked uncomfortable, others uncaring, but none of them lifted a finger. By the horse paddock there were the five strays who wore no insignia - the baker's boy, another boy with a straggly beard and three girls - and Holly. She was held between two woman soldiers. The five hesitated between her and the soldiers, unsure of who to believe.

Holly threw a look full of hate at Karn when she saw her. Morgan caught it, smiled in amusement, and drew closer to pluck Holly up by her chin. She forced her to look her in the eyes. "What have you been telling people, my dear?" she crooned. A fingernail curled into the flesh of Holly's neck like a claw.

"You're killing them." She raised her voice, throwing it to the doubtful sacrifices. "She's going to kill you!"

She laughed. "My darling, of _course_ I'm killing them." Morgan announced it clearly and beamed round at the crowd to admire the effect. The sacrifices flinched and shared looks of horror. The soldiers remained impassive. Morgan dropped Holly and danced over to the nearest of the strays, a tall girl with blonde hair and defiance growing in her expression. 

"Nothing can happen without payment or without sacrifice," she told the girl as lightly as if they were discussing the weather. "And you're mine to spend, along with the rest of these little piglets. Let's face it, it's the most good you'll ever be to anyone, my struggling dears." She tugged on one blonde lock, wound it between her long fingers. The girl moved suddenly and aimed a slap at her face, but Morgan was too quick for her. She twisted the girl's arm and turned her attack into a tumble. She fell face down into the mud at Morgan's feet.

" _But_ ," she dusted off her hands and shot a flash of a grin at the girl on the ground before her. "I should not have given the impression you had a choice in the matter. Anyway, in more pressing business," she pulled a knife out of the belt of the nearest soldier and ran a thumb over the blade, "we have six prisoners and I only need five for tonight."

Holly's eyes swum as Morgan twirled the blade and advanced on her. Karn started forward, her hand already on her axe haft. Morgan only raised an eyebrow at the threat, not taking it seriously. She waited for Karn to speak all the same.

"Mother, please."

Exasperation passed over Morgan's face. "Are you seriously not done with this chit?"

"Please."

Morgan sighed. "Very well. Since you are my daughter, and since you did find me my chalice without which no killing at all would have been possible, and despite that you are distressingly ungrateful - I'll make you a deal. If you can keep your pet a long way away from here and stop her causing trouble, I'll let you keep her. But one hint of a threat to the sacrifice and I'll cut her heart out myself, do you understand?" Karn nodded. "Deal?"

Holly shook her head urgently but Karn nodded for her. "Deal."

* * *

"History is a straight line," said the priest. He leaned on the lectern and peered myopically over it at the congregation below him. Mircalla sat slumped low and curled up upon herself in her pew between Lilita and Vordenberg. There was no Elle anywhere in the church. "A straight line," the priest repeated in his pedantic voice, "an arrow shot by the bow of the Lord. There is no returning to what we have done, never. Each moment is a decision, for God or for the Devil. Every moment of holiness lasts forever, unalterable. Every sin blots forever, unalterable. There is forgiveness indeed but never an unmaking of our errors. Grasp then to Christ, who is the straight path out of the labyrinth of error."

Mircalla stared fixedly at the altar. She did not look to her right to where Lilita sat with an ostentatious mask of piety, or to her left to where Vordenberg puffed his chest out as much as possible and nodded with an affectation of wisdom in his rheumy eyes. Elle had been taken from her two days ago.

She half-closed her eyes, opened them again to check that Reverend Smalls was well into his undistractable monotone sermonising, and let them drift again. There was dust dancing in the lances of light from the stained glass windows, and the stone steps half-visible through her eyelashes were stirred by the movements. They had planned to visit this place one night, she and Elle. It hadn't got past the planning stages, but she had suggested to Mircalla that the two of them could sneak out after dark and come here to where the ghosts must be thick on the ground. Somehow neither of them had thought to come during the day when the doors would be wide open, but then ghosts always did seem more at home in the night.

They would be thick on the ground at any time - this was an old church. Vordenberg had muttered something about it when he had led Mircalla and Lilita in before the service. There were medieval crypts under the altar and in the churchyard gravediggers turned up a layer of difficult and powdery ash three feet below the surface so that all coffins in the church were interred only shallow in the earth. If you could believe anything spoken by the hateful old man, who now kept Elle prisoner and whose malevolent eyes dared Mircalla to ask about her. She had kept her mouth shut, unsure as to whether any word from her now would be translated into a bruise on Elle's lovely face.

She forced her mind away from the tugging in her heart and tried to lose herself in the swirling of dust.

Her eyes closed fully and she loosed the connection to her body. Around her were the legions of the anonymous dead, faces unseen but presences undoubted. Hundreds of them, all waiting, but for what she couldn't tell. She felt a moment of kinship for the spirits. At times like this under all the ponderous unreal droning, the entirety of her life seemed to be a sort of waiting, an anticipation for some decision she had not yet made. She wondered what the ghosts were waiting for.

She stretched herself, trying to feel her soul's way out of the church and into the village where Elle was. The priest's words dulled in her ears. She found the tugging pins in her heart and followed. The scenes unfolded, half-seen, half-known, never touched.

In a stone cell, a tall woman with shorn blonde hair lay on a comfortless bed and stared at the ceiling. There were chilblains on her worn hands and an unwelcome crucifix around her neck. Outside it was cold and lonely and inside it was colder and lonelier, but Betty Spielsdorf had run out of tears. She frowned momentarily at the ceiling as Mircalla's hand touched her cheek, but it was only a spider.

On a gravel path another woman walked with feet blistered in thin shoes. She was not crying. She was eyeing the walls around the bare frosty garden and the way each of the doctors walked, how long their strides were. Melanippe Callis was planning, and in her concentration on her latest doomed escape plan she hardly noticed Mircalla fly past her as a magpie.

Mircalla left them in their prisons and tried against to find Elle. Somehow there was a block and her mind skated off. Instead she found her spirit walking the halls of Silas House, poking into rooms that were not the same as the ones she knew. There were shapes there in her mind's eye that she found strange and two women with familiar but somehow unplaceable faces wrapped up in each others arms in a deep sofa. They wore identical rings. She stroked the brow of the black-haired one who stared with empty eyes at a glass box and felt her tense. The brown-haired one who held her shivered at the passing chill. 

She left and followed down the hill the same path her sleepwalking feet had marked out for her only a week ago. Elle must be down below somehow but the vision was too crowded. There was a woman there with an axe, and her mind was a frantic coil of despair. Mircalla tried to touch her but she shook her off in annoyance. And there was someone else there lying on a pile of cushions, someone red and fiery whose ghostly eyes turned towards her as if she could see through the vision and into the present from whatever distant past she inhabited.

The red woman considered Mircalla's travelling spirit and pursed her lips. She reached out her hand that was like a crow's claw and Mircalla fled, still seeking in the dream her Elle.

Bed was a pile of blankets in the attic of Vordenberg's house. There were two trap doors down to the two sides of the house - one connecting to the main rooms and corridors prowled by the Baron himself and one to the servant's landing and their second network of passages. They were both locked. Here in the space between the ceiling and the roof there was enough room to stand up but only just. Elle sat on her bed in the dark and tried to hear if the bells in the village had rung yet. It was ten o'clock in the morning and there were no windows to let light in.

Mircalla ran through the wreckage of her choices and was jolted awake in her pew by the shuffling of the congregation getting up and her mother huffing impatiently. She felt Lilita's eyes on her and muttered an amen, which was at least ambiguous enough an alibi to escape an outburst of rage.

She was halfway out of the church and huddling up against the biting cold when she remembered that she had never been able to feel the ghosts before she had met Elle, and even then it was only when Elle was with her that the contact could be made. Whatever change in her awareness had been started those months ago, it was continuing.

* * *

"Life grows spirals more often than it does straight lines or circles," announced the voice-over On the television screen moved images of snail shells, the patterns of ferns, ammonites and whorled fingerprints. Some nature documentary or other. Neither of the girls was paying especial attention. Carmilla lying with her head on Laura's lap looked like she was sleeping, but she wasn't. Laura could tell she was staring blankly at the television with her mind far off elsewhere. 

"It is a question of growth," the voice-over continued. "Straight lines are too easily deflected by accidents, but a circle is too difficult to change. Life grows spirals, which are grown by adding piece after piece exactly the same as the last, and yet they do go somewhere in the end."

Laura felt Carmilla tense at some passing thought and then a chill ran over her as well. She glanced at the clock on the mantlepiece and found it mid-afternoon already and the shadows this close to winter already lengthening. They hadn't eaten lunch. She shifted Carmilla off her lap and gathered blankets and jumpers, brewed tea.

"Eat," she said when toast had been made and set on the coffee table.

"I don't want to."

"It wasn't a suggestion, Carm. Look at this face." She demonstrated. "You know this face."

The ghost of a smile. "I have faces too, cupcake."

"So long as they've got enough flexibility to chew and swallow, that's good enough for me. Faces that don't eat don't get kisses." She brandished the stack of toast and Carmilla consented to be fed piece by piece. "Talk."

There was the familiar cycle of expressions on her girlfriend's face. First there was the steel wall, the blocking out and bottling up of emotion; and then the remembrance that this was Laura asking; and then the relenting.

"I don't want to have to do it again," she said eventually. "Recovery, I mean. I did it once - hell, I did it _twice_ , once after leaving home and once after her death. If she's haunting us I'm going to have to do it again. It was bloody tedious." She took a piece of toast in her own hand and applied jam. "There. Do I get a reward for expressing an emotion?"

Laura made a face of deep thought. "Hmm, points but not cigar. I'll bear it in mind for future reward purposes, though."

She grumbled. "You're a harsh mistress. Since when do you make all the rules? Very well. More emotion: I don't like that I'm putting you through this. Especially not now that we've got all these plans." She twirled the ring on her finger.

"I admire you," Laura said all of a sudden, and surprised herself when she had been intending to say something about worrying about plans being her half of this relationship. "I really do, it's... when we first met I thought you were rude and grumpy and passive and apathetic and-"

"-any more?" She raised an eyebrow in a mock of being offended.

"- _really_ fucking hot," she added and got a smile for it. "And it took me so long to understand that this was progress for you. That you had been changing, that you'd struggled so hard to get to the point of grumpy useless and punk-rock. When she came to try to get you - that was when I saw how you chose to be something more whole, every day. So it's not something you inflict on me. It makes me love you all the more."

Carmilla snorted. "It's bloody small steps, cupcake. Seem to recall you had got three professors to resign for corruption by the time I managed to-"

"It's easy for me. I've got a supportive dad and also they were _really_ bad at being corrupt. Seriously, who leaves their computers just logged in? Point is, I never had to worry that any choice I made would cost me everything. Laura Hollis, ride or die, yeah? Because it never was 'die'." She pressed her head to Carmilla's.

"Until that day."

"Until that day."

Carmilla shifted around and tucked her legs around Laura. "I had a dream, the night before. You might remember, you complained I kicked a lot that night." Laura grimaced. Carmilla kicked like a pony. "I knew something was wrong, that she must be planning something bad because the letters had stopped. And I dreamed I was sitting outside at night somewhere under a rock and there was a girl there with an axe. She was trying to make a decision. And she couldn't do it because it scared her. So I said we should do it together, and she said yes so we got up and ran back to... well, it got weird after that. But I felt like she came back to help me on the tower top. When we were fighting my mother. Like we'd made our decision together.

"And you know what's utterly fucked?" She pulled apart the last slice of toast herself and, to Laura's inexpressible horror, dipped the crust straight into the marmalade jar. "Sometimes I wish we'd killed her sooner. Like, I could have kicked her off Shining Tor when I was ten and saved me a lot of trouble later."

"You're not serious. That would be like actual premeditated murder, not some last desperate act of self-defence."

"Oh, I know. And I'm not saying I'd have done it. But still. If it was always going to end like that, why did I put up with her for so long? Could have spared me a whole load of pain. And spared other people too. All the ones she drove away." She shrugged. "But then that couldn't have happened. Had to make all the smaller decisions before the big one. Had to work my way up. Which means _you_ , Miss Hollis, got the fun task of putting up with me when I did so."

She glanced out of the windows where the light was coming in sideways from the end of the day. It was strange. The sky was streaked with a dark lid of moving cloud, but around it there was a clear horizon from where spilled yellow light under the glowering roof. The television gave them the weather forecast - a satellite photograph showing the storm as it came across. Great curved bands of rain and wind, looping around the central knot moving in from the west.

"It's starting," Carmilla said. She hauled herself up from Laura's lap and looked out of the front window. Orange fire of the clearer sky and black smoke of rain clouds.

* * *

Holly had stopped fighting her after about half a mile, which made things easier but no happier. Instead she trudged behind Karn's footsteps, not dawdling but never coming close to catching her up either. She said nothing, not even in reply to Karn telling her to watch her step on difficult patches and once picking her up from the puddle she had slipped into. Karn kept looking back but she wouldn't meet her eyes. The day drew on and the sun began to fall into the western mountains ahead of them. Every shadow was already long behind them and if Holly looked back she saw hers straggling on to the chilly receding shape of Silas Hill.

They dropped down a slope where the ground was broken and hung with mosses and ferns. "Here will do," Karn announced, pointing to a hollow around the side of the slip. It was a place where the earth had been cleft in two and between two shoulders of rock there was shelter. She threw down her bag and the bundle of spare blankets. Holly watched numbly. "Sit down," she growled. Holly sat and stared into nothingness as Karn gathered fallen wood for a fire.

"You stopped me," she said.

"I stopped you getting yourself killed." She made the tinderpile out of dry leaves heaped out of the rain under the rocks and struck sparks into it. It started up slow and she bent to blow the fragile flames hot enough to catch the first twigs. "You're lucky to be alive. Mother usually kills without a second thought."

"She's killing _them_ without a second thought. The five. And you made a deal with her." Accusation ran through even the way she turned herself from the growing fire and would not accept its warmth. "You're just going to let it happen, aren't you? Just going to run and hide."

Karn laid the first larger pieces of wood, took dried meat from her pouch and offered it. It was ignored and she put it away again, eating nothing herself. "It wouldn't have mattered. If I stopped her killing one she'd just kill another. Someone's got to pay the tithe. She's been like that all my life." She warmed her hands on the fire and worked some life into the joints.

"And you never tried."

"And I never tried. Because I'd fail." Karn threw a blanket over Holly's shoulders and watched it lie where it landed. Holly would not even draw it in and it slid off her back, leaving her great green cloak her only cover.

"You could still have tried. I did."

"Their deaths are going to be much worse for what you did, sweetheart." Holly looked up to the bitterness in her voice. "They'll not get a cup of drugged wine and knife in the dark now. They won't drink it. Instead she'll drag them in kicking and screaming and do it the hard, old-fashioned way." 

Holly's face turned through horror, guilt, disgust, determination. "But I tried. And I'll try again. I don't expect you to help me. You can run and hide if you like, but I'm going back." She winced at Karn's weary expression. "And you think that's stupid."

"And suicidal, and naive." She shivered and found more words that she had not expected. "But it is beautiful that you try."

Holly was quiet. Her hands plucked at each other. "Why are you so afraid of her? I've seen you kill half a dozen men at once. When you..." she didn't know how to express it.

"When I flip, like on the Long Mountain? Yes. It won't be enough. Once she _made_ me flip. Just to see. Three days I was in this pit screaming at the walls and covered in my own blood before I was calm. Just to see - she wanted to know if she could use it." She stared into the fire and felt Holly's eyes on her. "It was hell, but she never goes there herself. Always someone else. Never her."

"The sacrifices."

"Yes. Magic takes out of you if you burn your own strength. But she pays her tithes in stolen kind."

Holly shifted around to face the fire properly and found the blanket that Karn had thrown her. She pulled it over her back and hunkered down into the slight but welcome warmth. "Turns out the world isn't quite how I thought it would be. I was hoping for adventures. I know it was stupid, but... like in stories, you know? I used to tell a lot of stories to my friends back at home."

Karn didn't sneer. "What kind of stories?"

"Oh," she let a smile twitch for a moment on her lips. "You wouldn't like them. All about heroic women and the battles they won. There was one... I heard if from my mother before she died. It was about a girl whose love was stolen away by the Queen of the Elves. And she went to get him back-"

"Him?"

"Well, it was 'him' when my mother told the story. And when I was telling the story to other people. But it was always 'she' in my own head. Of course." They shared an understanding grin at that. "Anyway, she went out to get her love back, but the Queen turned him - or her - into different shapes to get her to let go. Into a wolf, and a bear, and a snake, and hot iron, and some others. And every different shape her love turned into scared her but she held on and on until she had stopped changing. And then they were free. That was my favourite."

Karn's face twitched in something that was not a smile. "Well. That's a nice story, but it's not how real ones goe, pretty girl. The story goes: the strong fight the weak and the cunning are triumphant. And when the weak are vanquished, Morgan holds out her hand for her very much inevitable prize."

She stared through Karn's face and through the stone around them and still further out. "That's a stupid story. I don't want to be a part of that story. My story is different."

* * *

Laura winced and gave Carmilla a smile of apology as her opening up of the yellowed copy of _Tales of Enchantment and Transformation_ caused the old spine to crackle and split a bit. She settled in against Carmilla's side and nudged the side table lamp over. Outside the rising wind was beginning to throw scatters of small raindrops at the window. They dug deep into the blankets and cushions and folded legs together. "Stories, stories," Laura announced after turning the pages to find the table of contents. Some of them had teenage Carmilla's spiralling doodles in the corners. "What have we got? _Beauty and the Beast_ , obviously. _Hans My Hedgehog_ ," she giggled, "Good name. A selkie story - they always make me sad. _Tam Lin_ , yep. Oh, _The Shepherd Boy_. The Brothers Grimm. I like that one."

She cleared her throat and began. Carmilla watched her, enchanted as usual.

"Once upon a time there was an emperor in a far off land who had no sons. Not thinking to give his lands to his daughter because feminism wasn't A Thing then," Laura applied her own paraphrases as usual, "he decided to have a competition for his inheritance and declared it would only go to one who could answer three questions. But nobody could answer even one. Then one day when he had almost given up a shepherd boy asked for a chance to try the emperor.

"So the emperor asked him, _How many drops of water are there in the sea?_ But the shepherd boy told him that the question was a trick, because until the emperor could dam all the rivers flowing into the sea and stop all the rains falling the number would be always changing. And the emperor smiled and asked him _how many stars are there in the sky?_ The shepherd boy said he could not write the number down because he was illiterate, but he could make a tally. So he began tallying with little lines on a sheet of paper until there was not a single white speck left and the whole page was black with ink. And he said that he had written the number for those who could read it.

"And the emperor smiled and asked a third question of the shepherd boy. And he asked, _how many seconds in eternity_?"

* * *

"How long, Karn? How long are you going to let her do this? Let her make you a part of it?" She scrambled to the other side of the fire. She was close, trembling. Karn saw the smudges of dirt on her cheeks, the cheeks she had kissed only the previous night. "You're better than that."

Karn brushed her away. "I'm not. Sweetheart, I'm not. You should have learned that by now. I'm not the hero of this story."

"But you could be! You could change, you don't need to be under her control. We could do it together, right now. Just stand up and go back."

Karn stared into Holly's eyes and felt dizzy as from a great height. She could almost see it reflected in the girl's eyes, the path strung out in front of her, all composed of tiny imperceptible steps that began with standing up right now.

And ended with death. She stayed sitting as the fire threw up sparks and the night tasted of smoke. Above them the first inevitable stars were coming out in their irremediable patterns.

"Don't go expecting heroic warrior shit from me, love." Holly twitched at the word, but Karn carried on. "It won't be like that. What I am - what she's turned me into - is not something I can just walk away from. I belong to her whether I like it or not."

* * *

Mircalla sat at the window looking out across the valley and trying to work out which of the shadowy houses down below was Vordenberg's and wondering whether Elle was looking out of the lit windows. Probably not.

"I couldn't," she said out loud. There was nobody to reply to her insistence, so she said it again and watched the words fog on the window. "I can't. It wouldn't. It wouldn't have. Eventually." Sentences didn't work. It was all loose ends. It would not cease. It would not. The trap was wound around her.

The ghosts behind her and beside her were mute and eloquent. She pushed off their imagined urging. It was getting stronger, she knew. Whatever veil had been first drawn aside when she met Elle was getting thinner and thinner. She could almost see them out of the corner of her eye.

"You don't know," she told the listeners. "You don't know what she can control. Always she can make it worse, _always_ she can drag me back. If I wanted to escape her, I should have killed her the first time she threatened me. I should have pushed her off a roof. Should have done anything. Should have run away with Betty. Or with Mel. Or with Elle when she asked. Too late now."

She listened to voices made of candlesmoke and the slow movement of dust. Mircalla's fingers wound a pattern in a patch of dust under the window pane and wondered whether, since the ghosts were always there, every movement she made was like planchette carrying a message. If every intrusive thought was a prompting, every moment of inspiration a voice whispering in her ears carrying a message from the distant past. She left the window and wandered through her room before coming back to where she had started for lack of anywhere better.

"It's too late. That was what Elle-" she broke off and a sob caught in her throat. "Elle thought we could win. One short sharp fight. And she's out there now, same as the others before her. Again and again. Jesus _fuck_ ," she screamed all of a sudden as a spasm of rage took her, "when will it _stop_? When will it _stop_ happening?" Her fists hit the sill and the pane. She threw herself against the wall, pounded her fists against the stone and plaster until the house shook.

She sagged down against the wall and cried.

"What do I do, tell me what to do."

* * *

"And he asked, _how many seconds in eternity_?"

"And the shepherd boy said, _Somewhere there is a mountain made out of a single pure diamond. It's a whole mile long and a whole mile wide and so high the top is lost in the clouds. And every hundred years a little bird comes along and lands on the mountain. It sharpens its beak on the diamond peak - one stroke left, one stroke right - before flying away for another century. Slowly, fraction by fraction, it is wearing the mountain down._ "

" _And when the diamond mountain is worn away to nothing, flat as the plain that surrounds it, the first second of eternity will be over._ "

Laura closed the book and Carmilla recalled herself to herself. There had been something on the edge of sound just then as Laura said her last words, a sound that reminded her of the pacing and turmoil in her old bedroom the other day that had presaged the attack, and for a moment she had frozen in fear. It was over now. She looked down on Laura and smiled. "That's a hell of a long time," she said.

"That's a hell of a bird," Laura countered and Carmilla laughed. That was definitely Laura's way of looking at things.

"True." She reached out and found her cocoa cooler. "Here's to wearing difficult things down." She toasted, put the mug down and frowned. She listened. Laura met her eyes and they were suddenly wide. 

Out from the hallway, from the front door, there was a knocking. It came again: three beats in succession. A fist against wood.

"There's someone at the door." Laura had a thought. "We're not expecting anyone? Also, we have a doorbell."

The knocking again. Too regular, too persistent. Whoever it was wasn't waiting for a reply. Three knocks, pause, three knocks. Incessantly. Laura got up.

"No. Cupcake." Her face was white and Laura didn't go out into the hall. Instead she crept to the rain-speckled windows at the front of the living room and peeked out cautiously onto the shadowy porch cut through the mixed light of sunset and storm.

"There's nobody out there," she said, and no sooner had she said it than the knocking began again in spite of the absence of knocker, and again, and again.

A curtain of rain wrapped the house and started a rhythm on the roof. The wind rose louder and louder and the first arm of the storm hit, and with it the knocking became a drumming.

* * *

"Fine. Fucking fine." Mircalla slammed the chalice down on the table and filled it from her water jug. She grabbed pencil and paper from the bureau, tarot cards from a pocket in her suitcase, a planchette from its hidden place in a drawer. "What do you want me to do, since you apparently watch everything? What do you want me to do, god damn it?"

She was far too agitated for a seance, but she did it anyway. She didn't have Elle, but she did it anyway. It took a good time to calm her mind enough for her to feel the presence at the back of her head to sink back into, but it wasn't far away. It stirred like the movements of water underneath one lying on a still lake.

She opened her eyes on her own face. It was the mirror that had always stood on the dressing table but which she had never seen from this place because Elle always say in the other chair. She stared at her eyes in the glass, willing herself to understand, willing herself to break through to the whisperers who surrounded her. Her vision swum and she tried to dissolve the present world to seek out the ghosts.

"There's nobody there," she said to the silent room in frustration. "There's nobody there but me."

She saw herself nod in the glass and then in a shock of inspiration, found an answering echo to her own searching. She remembered the women wrapped in each others arms that she had touched in her dream, the woman with the axe whose mind thrashing in despair had so reached out to her across the centuries. She kept finding them, Mircalla understood, because as she was reaching out, so too were they. Each listening to the other. She stretched out her mind to find them deliberately. Her own eyes in the mirror were the only real things she saw, but in the depths of her soul she reached like someone groping in a cave for an outstretched hand. She found the woman with the axe and the one who would sleep in the bedroom down the corridor only not now, not yet. 

With a shock, with a moment of recognition, she broke through with a gasping feeling like plunging into a cold fountain. They were not far: they were right here. Closer than anything. Close enough somehow that they could hold hands across the years. As she tightened her grip on them she felt movement down the chain of hands, a fundamental demand being passed down from whatever fixed point they were suspended. One order only, whispered in her ear from the one above her. She did her duty and whispered it in the ear of the one below and then broke the contact.

She shivered back to herself in her room. On the paper before her, her automatic writing was for once crisp and simple: _hold on_.

* * *

The drums were sounding on Silas Hill. The noise was muffled and confused at this distance, but it carried through the still night like thunder, like a far-off storm. Karn started awake, hitched herself onto one of the surrounding rocks and saw the spark of flame lighting up at the foot of the distant hill. She checked down below in case she'd woken Holly up but there was nobody there. In the hollow was her bundle of blankets made up as if they still covered someone and the dying remains of the fire. The blanket bundle was empty when she touched it. There was still fresh wood stacked up spare next to it.

"Sweetheart?" she called. There was no response. She cast the blanket off her shoulders and jumped up onto one of the overhanging stones that made their shelter again. "Holly!" she called again into the dusk. She took a smouldering stick from off the fire and blew on it until it flickered into flame. On the soft ground above their shelter, going east, were footprints.

"Fuck," she muttered cast around. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." A twig cracked behind her and she turned in sudden hope but there was nothing except the vague hint of something small darting back into the undergrowth. 

"You damned idiot," she hissed, cursing herself, cursing Holly, cursing everyone. "I fall asleep for a damned _hour_ and now you're out there being slaughtered. Oh Gods, you're out there being slaughtered." Karn sat down with her head in her hands and chewed on her fingernails.

On the ground in the flickering firelight, she sat quiet and prayed for inspiration though she didn't know to whom. Slowly she watched her fingers twitch. They traced a curving trail in the dirt before her and she stared. She started as an imagined voice kissed her ear and whispered a pair of words.

Very slowly, as if in a dream, she pulled out her knife from her belt and tested the edge.

In the back of her head she could feel scurryings and promptings coming from Gods-knew-where. It was suddenly very simple, like how falling must be simple for one already over the edge. She rolled up her sleeve and cut a deep notch into her forearm. The blood welled up and she dipped her finger into it. She painted her forehead and her cheeks, ran a line down her lower lip and closed her eyes to dab blood on her eyelids. She scooped a handful into her palm and licked it off. She drank from her wound and opened her eyes in preparation for the other to come and the rage with her.

There was no rage at first, and when she felt the familiar heat beginning to build in her it was not as before. As every time, there was the feeling of being pushed, of being weighed down by the pressure of another who held her tight and bound her. Normally this drove panic into her until she lashed out in fury and strength, but tonight some balance had shifted. The other with the unseen face pressing down was no threat. They moved together. She was not caught so much as catching. Karn stood up, feeling the other stand up with her. She checked the axe at her belt and made her decision.

* * *

Elle sat bolt upright in her pallet of old clothes that served as her bed as inspiration came in. There had been a dream, such a dream as was beyond... it faded. But there was the image of fire and smoke piling up to the sky and someone running.

This was a large attic, extending over the whole of the top floor. And so therefore it did not match up with the rooms below. Which meant that - she paced carefully, trying to see with her mind's eye the half-glimpsed layout of the Vordenberg house below and how big it had looked from outside when she was brought in - that the servant's staircase was below _that_ side and the main staircase below _that_ side. And therefore she had access to both sides of the house, though they were divided below with only a few places to change sides. Which meant that if-

It meant that if she took the one single pathetic oil lantern she was permitted and crept over to the side above the main staircase she could use the light to find the nails that held down the attic floor and discover which of the boards was nailed down improperly. And if she pulled off a shank button from her coat and bit through the thread she could wedge it in to the gap and use it as a lever. And if she did it again and again and kept trying despite the slowness of the task she could get that one single floorboard loose. It was a boring task but she had nothing else to do. It took an imperceptible age before the first nail was out, and another for the second which bent the first button out of shape. She pulled the second nail with a second button. After that she could wiggle the board and it was easier.

She looked down on a twenty foot drop straight down the stairwell to marble tiles on the ground floor far below. Which was less good, but to either side were the carpeted stairs and the heavy velvet curtains that marked each landing's window bay. No way to get herself down without ripping out the entire floor, but a lantern could certainly be thrown. She loosened the cap on the fuel reservoir, lowered it through the gap and swung.

For a few seconds she thought she had failed but then the oil in the wick ran out and the flame consumed the cloth itself, running down into the reservoir and catching the oil both inside and leaking out. The fire started in the carpet and began to spread towards the nearest curtains, slowly at first and then gathering force as the heat rose.

Which left her trapped in the attic as smoke began rising through the floorboards. This could have been planned better, perhaps with an escape route organised first. True, but if she went over to the other side by the servant's half of the house and screamed as loud as she could, someone would come to see what the fuss was about. There was always at least one servant awake.

So she screamed and shouted and banged on the trapdoor and on the floor. The rising smoke was already starting to make her eyes water when there was a clinking and grinding from below as one of the footmen unlocked and lifted the trapdoor.

"What the fuck are you-" he started, and then she hit him across the head with the removed floorboard. He fell back across the toppling ladder and Elle dropped to the servant's landing on top of him. It was a soft landing for her at least. He probably had at least one broken rib, which gave her regret at first until she recognised him as the one who Lilita had summoned to remove her from Mircalla's house. Payback for William.

On this side of the house there was not yet any sign of fire, but the moment it spread from the main staircase into any room with a servant's entrance it would cross over quickly. Already there was some noise and movement from below, someone woken up by smell or sound, possibly even by her own screaming. She tightened her coat around her and tiptoed as quietly as possible down the bare wood floor. There were store cupboards to the left and on the right were the doors into the main house where the fire was growing and strengthening.

Down a precipitous creaking staircase she went, trying to form a plan. She hadn't really got further than getting out of Vordenberg's house, but there needed to be something afterwards. She obviously had to get Mircalla - even if Mircalla might not want to come. Might not have the courage. Might not even - well, Lilita had lied, obviously. Except what if she hadn't entirely lied, and she wouldn't be the first girl Mircalla had left to her fate.

But in Elle's book there was always room for another try. 

There was a wavering light coming up the stairs in front of her and a night-capped housekeeper peered forward.

"What- what are you doing?" she demanded.

"Fire!" burst out Elle, leaning on the wall for support for her delicate nerves. "There's fire! Smoke was coming through the floorboards. William's gone to try and wake people, you've got to get the servants up, please, please it's spreading everywhere." The woman wavered but Elle shouted, "Go!" in the most imperative voice she could. The woman scuttled and Elle followed her down, wishing she would move faster.

At the bottom of the stairs the housekeeper was just saying, "come this way" when Elle promptly took the opposite way into the nearest kitchen. She dodged amongst the tables as some cook coming blearily out of their own room called her to stop, then into the pantry, then the expected door and finally she was out into the night air. She sighted Silas Hill and ran.

* * *

The banging at the front door was becoming an incessant drumming, blurring with the wind rattling the windows and rain thrumming on the roof. The sky outside was charcoal grey, smoke grey and the occasional shafts of light from between were yellow, orange, fiery. There was the noise of branches being blown around, bushes ripped in the wind out on the hillside.

The house shook with an impact coming up from below the floor. The cellar door shuddered and from below was the crashing of something collapsing. On the bookcase, a handful of spare change vibrated across the wood and tipped itself off the edge of the shelf onto the floor. A gust of wind screamed down the chimney and splattered rain and a pair of black feathers into the grate.

Carmilla clung to Laura's hand. "I think we're- _shit_!" she cried as the door out to the hallway slammed open and the door handle punched into her back, nearly overbalancing her into the grate. She kicked it shut again with malice and rubbed her back.

The great bookshelf in the living room rocked, teetered on its edge and fell forwards. The books slipped out first so that they were flattened open and piled up when the case itself crashed on top of them and splintered at the edges. Carmilla jumped back and was just quick enough to escape the ornaments on the mantlepiece being thrown at her head by an unseen hand. Two broke in showers of glass on the opposite wall, but one aimed itself directly at Laura's head and she batted it away with the book she still clutched.

"Carm!" Laura ducked under a falling lampshade and grabbed her hand. "We need to get out of here. Car keys?"

"Bowl in the hall." She shook her head and punched a flying book out of the air. "No good, though."

"What?"

"You really want to open the front door to who's out there, sweetheart?"

Laura's eyes widened, but the thumping on the door had not ceased and it was impossible to hear it as anything but palms pounding on the wood by someone at the limit of desperation. Carmilla laughed, wild and without humour.

"Okay, so we fight her! How do we fight a poltergeist? Or whatever!"

"Not an area I've researched."

"Right." Laura took hold of the vibrating door handle out into the hall and wrestled it still. "Upstairs on the count of three, okay? And no looking at the windows until we're clear of the ground floor."

The hallway was resounding like the tolling of a bell. Laura shouted in her ear to not look, but Carmilla glimpsed a shadow on the other side of the frosted glass in the door, a shadow woman-height along with staccato eruptions of darkness that were like fists hitting the window. Laura dragged her through the hallways past the chaos of old letters and torn coats. One of the banisters broke in two as she touched it and splinters cut pain in her hand. A handful of wood pieces flew at them and she swatted them with the book like they were flies.

* * *

Mircalla was ransacking her room. She gathered her things, Elle's discarded things, whatever she could find that might be useful and in no particular order. Warm clothes for them both and what candles she could blow out while still having one to light her packing. She stuffed them away so fast and carelessly that the not yet dried wax seared her fingers. Loose change scavenged from a dozen different pockets scooped up into her purse, the railway timetable they had followed two weeks before. As she went on, the pressure of doing something at long last goaded her to get faster and faster. She emptied cupboards and pulled out drawers, throwing everything onto the floor and rifling through it until her room looked like the victim of a burglary. She made bundles and filled two suitcases. 

Mircalla was completely without a plan. Find Elle was about the strength of it. And Elle might not even want to come, might have already judged herself abandoned like Betty and Mel before her, might blame Mircalla for everything - but something had turned around inside Mircalla and she focused on the might rather than the might not. Lilita would follow them - Vordenberg too, if he was willing to abduct girls into his home, he clearly had some understanding with her mother. So they'd have to go fast and far. It would be the change and the end of everything. 

It was almost exciting. She dumped out half of the luggage already packed and discarded things that were too specific. There would be no need for half the clothes - she shed those skins cheerfully. She could abandon anything summery, because they'd be somewhere else when summer came. Maybe they'd even be in Paris, in that terrible apartment Elle had been so hopeful and enthusiastic about. Maybe Elle would have taught her shorthand by then, and maybe she would have taught Elle to speak French.

With a last sentimental impulse she shoved the silver chalice into one of the bags and looked up to see her own wild eyes in the mirror. They looked ghostly. Her hair was awry. She looked happy.

The twisting of the key in the lock of her bedroom door alerted her and she jumped back as it swung open. Lilita was already pink in the cheek and her hand was twisting the red cameo brooch with a crow that she always played with when tense. She didn't seem to have been in bed. Her eyes passed over the bags, the bundles, Mircalla's guilty and flushed face. She sighed and closed the door behind her.

"Are you really that foolish?" she asked, weary and exasperated. "We've been over this. You agreed. You're staying to do your duty to your family." She marched to the window and peered out at the night as if expecting there be to be someone out there waiting for her daughter. She opened the pane and clamped the shutters. "You remember what I said to you about your duty?" she asked in the flickering light. "We have dues to pay to fulfil our role in all this."

"I-" Mircalla started. She drew herself up. "My duty isn't to you. It's to Elle."

A sneer. Lilita switched from encouragement and remembrance to threats. "Your little 'cupcake' is still in Vordenberg's house, you know. One word from me and I'll find a way to make her life even more uncomfortable than it already is - and I'll make damn sure that she knows it's your fault." She tugged one of the suitcases out of Mircalla's hands and placed it back on the bed. "Sit down, Mircalla."

Mircalla watched her mother's hands contort like claws and remained standing. "No," she said. "We're not having this conversation again."

Lilita gripped a lock of Mircalla's hair, half twining it and half pulling it. Mircalla closed her eyes as she pressed her face close. "Precisely. You know we've been over this, my dear. You've already agreed. You've already done it, darling. You've already said yes and there are no second choices." She sighed. "You're a fool if you think this girl loves you, really loves you. _I_ love you Mircalla, like only a mother-"

"You don't. I'm a possession to you."

A flicker passed over Lilita's face. She leaned closer still so that Mircalla could feel her breath against her cheek. Lilita's lips almost touched her ear. "I made you, daughter. I gave you everything that makes you. What would you be without your schooling and your fine ways that _I_ raised you to have? What is she compared to you, my darling delightful girl? I think you're a practical girl and you'll realise that everything I do is for the best."

Her voice was small but insistent. "I'm going."

"You said that before and didn't." She dismissed the threat with a wave of her hand. "Don't pretend you'll make a different choice a second time. Or how many times is it, daughter dearest? Isn't this the _third_ whore you've not cared enough to give up your old life for?"

The blood came to her cheeks. "I will. Now get out of my way."

Lilita sneered. She raised a hand but before she could strike, Mircalla slapped her. The sound deadened everything around it and in the seconds that followed there was nothing but the colour rising in Lilita's cheeks before she launched herself at her daughter.

At first it was just an uncertain grappling as Mircalla tried to push past her and Lilita simply tried to pin her against the wall. But when neither gave way, the shock in them both at having finally crossed that line turned into fury. Lilita pulled away enough to backhand her daughter across the face, the rings on her fingers cutting. Mircalla was momentarily stunned, stars in her vision and through them cut the vision of an axe. She sprung forward and crushed her mother against the door, knocking her head on the wood.

They struggled there, stumbling out of the bedroom into the corridor and the landing over the stairs. Lilita's nails drew blood from cheeks and forehead. Mircalla found a grasping wrist and bit down until she screamed. Scratches marked her own face too, a smear of blood running over her lower lip. Rising to the surface from inside her was a rage she had never felt before, or which if she had ever felt had always been leashed.

"'Calla!"

For a moment both Mircalla and Lilita froze. Down in the hallway, at the bottom of the stairs was Elle. She was smeared with dirt and dust, her shoes crusted with mud and her skirt torn in several places, but she was there. At the sight of her Lilita turned white and then red, but Mircalla felt resolve shoot through her. 

In the moment when Mircalla stared disbelieving at the appearance of Elle, Lilita seized her by the throat. She squeezed, and the air went out. Her knees buckled.

"You're a disappointment to me, my dear. It pains me to say it, but a daughter like you really is a liability more than an asset. And everything I do is for the family honour, you know that. No matter how harsh."

But Mircalla had passed the point of fear. With one desperate effort and the last of the energy in her she surged upwards and pushed her mother off her feet. She flew backwards, losing her footing, and then tripped back over the top stair.

Elle screamed as Lilita tumbled down the stairs and crashed into the wall, the floor and the side table and lay still. She did not get up, and after a horrified second blood began to spread from underneath her head.

When Mircalla made it down the stairs coughing and spluttering Elle was cowered against the wall, hand clamped over her mouth. Mircalla took one of her hands and held it still in its shaking. Then the other and then life was in Elle's limbs again and she clutched Mircalla's cheek, sobbing with fear and relief. 

"Are you hurt, it looks like you're hurt and your neck and there's blood on you, 'Calla you're _bleeding_."

Mircalla waved her off and held on, held to arms and face and waist as if trying to be sure Elle was all in one piece. "It's fine, I'm fine," she rasped through her agonised throat. "You came, how did you come?"

Elle's only answer was a kiss. "You fought her," she said as she broke away.

"I killed her. God, I killed her." They turned to Lilita's broken body. "I had to. When you came, I knew-"

"Knew?"

"That she was lying. That I could, for you."

"But you-"

"It was her. It was always her. I didn't know till the night she had you taken away. She knew all about Betty and she knew about Mel, I didn't believe she had really known anything but then she-" she choked on a sob.

Elle enfolded her. Mircalla cried on her shoulder, shivering in the cold from the open door. Elle slipped off her green coat and wrapped it around Mircalla's shoulders. "She lied. She always lied. She said you didn't care." Before Mircalla could ask, she added, "are you packed?"

"Upstairs."

She came out of their bedroom with two bags and set them down. At the end of the landing there was the staircase up to the attic. With a glance at Mircalla's heaving shoulders on the bottom step below she tiptoed across and stood next to it, not looking in.

"How many of you are listening?" she whispered to the door that stood ajar.

Sarah-Jane was silent for a moment before whispering back through the door. "Just me, Miss. Natalie was too scared to leave our room and Miss Perry's not back from the trip the Mistress sent her on."

"We're going."

"Yes Miss."

"Do you want Mircalla to have a happy life?"

"Yes Miss. I wasn't happy about what the Mistress did," she added in a hurry.

"In half an hour you're to go to the village and tell them what happened. Any longer and people will get suspicious about you. Tell them you overheard me telling 'Calla that we're going to go south and try to get to Ludlow. Tell them that it was self-defence, just in case. But, you know, don't hurry to find the right person to tell. A little confusion and delay would be nice. I think you'll find people quite busy enough down there."

"All right, Miss," whispered Sarah-Jane through the door. Elle moved away to check that Mircalla was still downstairs and out of earshot. "Are there any weapons in the house?"

"Not really. There's the old master's sword, but-"

Elle grinned. "But nothing. Thank you."

She came down the stairs with the suitcases, sidestepping Lilita's crumpled body. "Up you get, 'Calla. Suitcases in hand." She ducked into the living room and retrieved the sword with its yellow braid loop around the handle.

"I should-"

"We haven't time, 'Calla. We need to run right now. Half the district's awake already." She dragged Mircalla by the hand and out into the night air. She led the way to the stone-covered lip that looked out over the valley and showed her why. Below Silas Hill the land was lit up and the breeze smelt of smoke. Mircalla stared in sudden comprehension. The village away to the west was awake around a conflagration. And Elle's hair in her face smelt of smoke too.

"Oh my God. Cupcake, tell me you didn't-"

"I set fire to Vordenberg's house." She threw up her hands. "Look, there wasn't time and I had to think of something!" 

In spite of it all Mircalla burst out laughing. "I love you."

"Yes, very good. Now come on!" She pulled on her hand again and the two of them fled the hill.

* * *

Upstairs was quieter than downstairs, but only slightly. The attack was rising up from the ground, pushing into the house from the front door and the ground underfoot. Up here it had only reached the stage of shaking and resounding to the chaos below. Laura dashed to the bathroom and the particular back window which overlooked the bushes in the garden below. There might be a way out but when she looked out she pulled back.

Outside of the windows in the turmoil of the storm were crows circling, hundreds of them and so close to the house that they dipped and wove over the gables. Black feathers stuck on the windowpanes. Down in the garden was a formless darkness and it roiled against every door and window and stone block of Silas House like the flowing tide throwing itself at an island. The bushes out back were torn out by the roots and the land surged like waves. There was not one attack but an assault from all sides as centuries of built-up tension discharged itself upon the house.

"Any good?" Carmilla hung onto the bathroom door trying to keep her eyes from looking down the stairs at the most visible intrusion battering down the door. Laura shook her head.

"Bedroom," she said.

Their bedroom was no better than anywhere else but it was at least the most familiar. Most things were still in place and not yet disturbed: their clothes still in the cupboards or at least strewn in the normal places, their book collections stacked on the shelves, Laura's laptop on the dressing table, the silver chalice with the spiral swirls on the bedside table, the sword leaning against the wall. Laura dropped _Tales of Enchantment and Transformation_ on the floor and drew the curtains against the storm and the circling of the crows.

"What does she want?" she asked. "Assuming it's-"

"It is." Carmilla leaned against the wall, pale and frightened. "It's her, I know it is. And it's me she wants. It was always about controlling me, nothing more."

"But she's dead, Carm." Laura stroked her cheek. "What can she possibly _do_ with-"

"It's not about what she can do. That was never the point." She shook her head. "It's about the control. It's a madness. She just wants to have me, and if she's in hell then she just wants me down there with her. That's all."

Laura set her face. "Well she can't fucking _have_ you. I've got you booked! You hear that?" she shouted at the door. "This one's taken!" There was no reply except the accelerating turmoil of the circling wind and the drumming of the rain on the roof getting louder and louder. A wailing on the wind rose in pitch and gathered in volume, some banshee-like screeching. Carmilla clapped her hands over her ears.

For a single moment there was an unexpected lull in everything, a muffled quiet as they passed into the eye of the storm. The rain drew aside and the wind held. In that moment of balance Carmilla's eyes rolled up into the back of her head and she collapsed back on the bed and began shaking.

* * *

The way was long but she ate up the miles and ignored the slips and falls that snared her. This was broken country, full of tangled woods and rocks outcropping at odd angles but she pursued Holly across it like it was a plain. The night was dark but Silas Hill was a darker shape across the eastern horizon and even at this distance there was fire at its base.

She took the straightest path she could, bounding up the rolling ground as it rose. A scarp loomed ahead of her and she jumped up it, grabbing the top and pulling herself over like a cat bounding over a wall. She broke through the wood and came into the open land.

Karn drew her axe from her belt without breaking her run. Silas Hill sat before her, the camp below burning with a chaos of flame. A great bonfire in the centre poured a circling tower of smoke into the night and caused the stars above to wink in and out of shape. The roar of the burning pressed on her ears and the taste of it seared her lungs. 

Guards stood watch around the perimeter, silhouettes of their spears barred against the firelight. Closer to the fire were more soldiers, monotonously drumming their spears on their shields. Wherever Holly was, wherever her fight had inevitably failed, was in there amid the circling hell. The fire and smoke and darkness twisted into momentary shapes: patterns, animals, faces pricked out in blurs on her vision. It must have been visible for miles around, a great signal to whoever or whatever Morgan dealt with.

Fear curled in the pit of her stomach, but the feeling that she was not alone persisted. The others who shared her life made the decision for her. Karn chose her first opponent, filled her lungs, and charged.

She came out of the night at the guards. The first saw her and his face briefly registered shock and then confusion as he recognised her. Then deathly fear. He barely had time to level his spear before she shivered it from his arm and drove her axe into his face. She split his skull and roared through the blood spray. His shield with its blazon of a crow on a red field she ripped from his dead arm as his body hit the ground and the nearest guards were already coming to the sound of battle. She spat death at them.

They were disoriented. As each of Morgan's guards saw and recognised her they had a moment of pause but she gave them no peace for it. Her strength grew in the fury and the red mist and she broke shields, spears, limbs. She shoved with the shield on her own arm and took all the blows without thought for avoiding them. It was broken into pieces under sword blows and she fought with fragments of wood clinging to the boss. She stepped over the bodies and discarded it for a lost spear. The tall woman who was her sparring partner went down to a single thrust of it and choked her lungs out on the damp grass before Karn snapped her neck with the axe and bellowed in desperate hate.

There were other followers of Morgan gathered in the camp who were not soldiers. They had retreated to their huts and tents to wait out the ritual but some came out a the sound of battle. The first to try and accost her she killed, and then the second. The rest fled, but she did not chase them or seek after any more who might be hiding. Karn faced the flames.

The great structure Morgan had had built was all aflame. At first she thought it was a simple ring but then she drew closer and saw the form. It was folded round itself until it became a winding labyrinth with a narrow entrance between roaring flame. Smoke billowed around her in infinite forms clutching at her arms and whispering in her ears.

Karn took it at a run, smoke in her nostrils and burning in her belly. The walls turned and warped in a curve, sending her circling round and closer to the centre. Stray wisps of her hair singed. Cuts and grazes on her face seared. Arms of fire flickered out from the wall. Her pounding footsteps hammered in her head, echoed as if there were dozens of versions of her behind her, all of them driving her forwards. After a complete circle she came into the centre. It was wide, sixty paces to a side and with enough space that anyone working in the centre could be safe from the fire, although they would never escape the heat and the ever-present smoke that made the eyes weep.

Morgan stood there in the middle, wild-eyed in the firelight. She was stripped to the waist with thick trails of blood running down her shoulders and over her bare breasts and stomach. Her tangled hair was loose and matted together with sweat and gore. Karn saw on her face a mirror of the exultation and horror that must be on her own and in her hand was a long thin knife. Her fingers around it were dark with what she had done and in her other hand she held the chalice slick with the blood she had caught in it.

They were hung up around the circle. Each of the victims hung from posts, suspended by their hands and with their heads lolling over cut throats. Karn looked wildly from one to the other. Two young men; three young women. All of them dead, none of them Holly. Morgan met Karn's expression and looked over her shoulder.

Holly was there, struggling against a post. Alive. Unharmed, except that she was tied and gagged and there was a dark smudge on her cheek that might be a bruise. She saw Karn and there was wild hope in her eyes and fear as well.

"I don't need six," Morgan growled, flourishing the long knife and discarding the chalice to lie spilling blood on the ash-covered grass. "Five is enough. But threats to the sacrifice cannot be tolerated."

Part of Karn's mind shouted for caution, but she was too far gone in the fury to care. The taste of blood was in her throat and on her lips and in her mind were pictures of crows and a shaking house and a staircase. She hefted the axe and flung herself at her mother.

They fought in the centre of the spiral. Karn was perhaps stronger and a more seasoned warrior, but Morgan was almost inhumanly fast. She wielded her knife not like a sword but like a surgeon's tools. She avoided each axe blow smoothly. It was like trying to fight mist, but she sliced Karn across the cheek and again from the elbow to the shoulder - surface wounds, but they smarted and bled and slowed her fight. Her face was drunk with it.

Karn sagged under a cut across her back. She bent at the knees, heaving for breath, and Morgan danced out of reach. Cautiously she came closer and Karn was only quick enough to avoid the worst. Holly behind her cried out into her gag at the cut glancing across Karn's neck but Morgan's face twisted into a smile. She came closer and lunged.

Karn, surging upwards from her feigned defeat, twisted her axe around and hooked the knife out of her hand. In Morgan's moment of confusion she reversed the stroke and came back. There was no time for a proper change of blade direction, but the back of the axe caught Morgan full in the face and laid her on her back with an obscene crunch.

Unconscious or dead Karn didn't wait to check. Immediately she was at Holly's side cutting the ropes that bound her arms and pulling her off her gallows. She sliced the gag and let Holly gasp for air over her shoulder and then promptly cough at the sudden inhalation of smoke. She laid her on the floor and gasped in relief.

"You came back," Holly whispered.

She laughed despite herself. "Well, I thought it was time to do something really, really stupid." She looked around a the burning hell and the dead bodies of the five victims whose blood was mixed in the discarded chalice. "Did she... did she do what she was planning to do?"

Holly coughed. "I don't know. I don't think so. Just killed, not used." She pressed her face into Karn's shoulder and kissed it.

"Karn," she whispered sharply. "Karn, Morgan."

She was up. She didn't stand smoothly or even hesitantly, rather she arched her back and twisted herself round in a way that was half animal. Morgan crawled on all fours and snarled at them with a mouth that showed broken teeth. She scuttled, her head twisting at a disgusting angle. Karn pushed Holly behind her and tried to reach her abandoned axe, but Morgan was already there and tossed it to one side.

"You never learned," she said as she circled. She drew herself up to stand, but never lost the inhumanity of her movements - too fast, the angles not quite right. Karn tried to shield Holly. "Anything that I tried to teach you. Nothing can be without sacrifice."

"And what kind of lesson am I learning now, Mother? How you never bleed for your own sacrifices?"

"That's hardly the point, little kitten."

"What is?"

"That you _belong_ to me," she hissed. Her snarl was almost inhuman. "All of you! All of them! It is my due. For everything that was denied to me. _I have descended into hell!_ " she screamed suddenly, any mask of reason slipping. "And you will be here with me and she will be, and this hill and this land and this whole island with everyone on it will come down there with me." She launched herself at Karn and tore with nails that were claws and teeth that were fangs. 

Karn twisted and struggled. She punched and kicked and the two broke apart with heaving chests. Morgan crawled backwards to a place in the middle of the circle and arose with something picked from the floor in her hand.

"This is my curse on you, daughter. I will hunt you. I will never stop hunting you. Whatever you become, whatever face you wear, I will follow you. If you become a worm in the depths of Annwn, I will dig you out. If you become a cat in the trees I shall skin you. I tell you this," and she held up the chalice and emptied the last dregs over her head, "I shall be with you until time turns its circle and meets again, I-"

For an instant the scene stuck. There was Morgan driven to her knees and there Holly standing unsteadily above her. The knife handle stuck out of Morgan's collarbone. Karn scrambled to her feet and shouted at Holly to move but it was too late. Morgan, unhesitatingly, pulled the blade from her own body and drove it into Holly. Karn screamed and with all the hate in her dived for her abandoned axe and threw it across the circle.

The night was still. Morgan crumpled to the ground and Karn staggered upright. She limped over to the fallen women, took the axe handle and pulled it out of Morgan's chest. Numb and empty, she beheaded her mother.

She found at the foot of the abandoned stake where she had been bound Holly's green cloak - tattered from where it had been torn away but still in one piece. She gathered Holly into it and wept.

* * *

Down below the front door broke off its hinges and then the storm was back and inside the house. A shower of tiles slid off the roof and crashed onto the ground below in a heap of broken slate. Laura grabbed the fallen Carmilla by the wrists and struggled to hold her still. Her eyes were showing only whites and she shook unpredictably. The bed rattled. Her legs kicked out as if she were trying to run and her arms struck out wildly, fighting everything. 

"Carm, Carm talk to me. Talk to me, where are you?"

A thrashing and she bent double - Laura's grip on one of her wrists failed and she lashed out at the bedside table, knocking over the chalice and sending it skittering over the floor.

Carmilla stirred. Her expression was flickering. There was fear, hate, anger, everything boiling within it. The force animating her changed shape again and again as she lay there shaking under Laura's hands. Her face warped into something that didn't look like herself at all, for all that nothing physical was different. "That's hardly the point, little kitten," she sneered. The words twisted out of her.

"What is?" Laura stared down with horror at the features that were all Carmilla's and the expression that was not.

"That you _belong_ to me," she hissed. Her snarl was almost inhuman. "All of you! All of them! It is my due. For everything that was denied to me. _I have descended into hell!_ " she screamed suddenly, any mask of reason slipping. "And you will be here with me and she will be, and this hill and this land and this whole island with everyone on it will come down there with me."

A force threw itself against the bedroom door from outside and Laura lunged to grab the door handle and wrestle it shut. She forced it closed, let the attack subside for a moment and then jumped up to drag Carmilla towards her, unwilling to let go either of her or of the door for more than a second. Carmilla's flailing legs knocked the sword from its leaning position and it jangled onto the floor next to them both.

Carmilla's face flickered again and there was a new configuration, a new expression that was not her own although made up of the same features. "I made you, daughter. I gave you everything that makes you. What would you be without your schooling and your fine ways that _I_ raised you to have? What is she compared to you, my darling delightful girl? I think you're a practical girl and you'll realise that everything I do is for the best."

Carmilla fighting against her was too much for her to hold with only her arms. Laura dragged the green blanket off the bed and rolled Carmilla into it so that the thrashing of her limbs was restrained. Straining against the weight, she dragged her to the door so that she could sit holding it closed and keep Carmilla in her arms even as she fought the confinement.

"Carm. Carm, can you hear me?" she whispered with tears in her eyes. "Carm, hold on. I've got you."

* * *

She was caught. She felt it, knew she was caught. There was something wound around her that wouldn't let go no matter how hard she fought. It was all dark and she could see nothing: no bedroom, no house, nothing except an endless black abyss underneath her she could fall into at any moment. She knew who it was that held her in the shifting darkness, who suspended her over a black pit like a struggling spider or insect. She screamed with no words and turned her face from her, but that left only the pit below to look at.

There was something else down there. In the depths of her shaking heart she found another who was tied to her, who clutched her hand desperately with her own. She looked down into the abyss and saw the other one looking up at her with eyes that were like looking into a mirror. And below more mirrored eyes.

It was a chain. Her outstretched hand held someone, and that someone held another and it went down and down into the depths of the dark they hung suspended in. She tried at first to free herself of the weight of the past that clung onto her and would not let go, but it was clinging on even harder in a desperate attempt to not be lost.

And there was still something holding her from above. She shied away from paying attention to it, knowing who it was, fearing who it was, hating who it was who held her captive. Until her strength ebbed and there was nothing to do except let go of those she held or look up into the face of the one who held her.

And found she was wrong.

"Carm. Carm, can you hear me? Carm, hold on. I've got you."

Laura's words, whispered in her ear. She opened her eyes and there was Laura's face and Laura's arms around her, and Carmilla saw in the light of them that the winding around her was green and not red. She repeated the words to herself.

"Hold on," she echoed, and she heard an answering echo in turn from the one below her, and a fainter echo further down by someone still deeper in the darkness. The message passed down to all of them - all of her - struggling their way out of the trap that threatened always to pull them down. All together, all holding one another to pull herself out of hell life by life and at the top Laura holding her so close that she could find no space between them to slip away. 

"Hold on," she told all the others, and they told her the same.

* * *

The world came back to her in coolness and calm. She lay on the wooden floor under the green blanket, her body folded over Laura's as she braced against the shaking door. Noises and violence, the battering of the storm and the destruction of the house, but it was all far off. Closer things occupied her consciousness. There was something hard under her flung out left hand - the chalice. Just beyond her right was the somehow always reassuring sword. Here and there were fluttering pages torn from her old favourite book which lay face down some way away, but pressed hardest on her mind was the sound and feeling of Laura's heart beating against her.

Things had fallen into place somewhere deep inside her and an understanding formed in the chill of panic that she could not quite express in words. Everything finally gathered together like pieces of a puzzle.

She stroked Laura's arm and felt her relax with the realisation that Carmilla was still there. "It was you, cupcake," she said in wonder. Her voice sounded far off even to herself. She hardly knew what she was saying except that it was the right thing. "Always you, every time. You pulled me through time, you pulled me upwards. Always to here." The weight was slipping off from around her and it was only ever Laura's arms holding her, only Laura's hands gripping her. Only Laura here with her.

"So many," she said and heard her voice crack. "So many times we kept trying. So much blood soaked into the hill. So much of us both abandoned to death. So many turnings, so much lost on the wayside. All for you." She struggled up to look in her eyes streaked with tears and trembling from the indescribable effort. "You, behind the changing of it all, it was always you."

There was a moment, just a single moment, when they both knew what Carmilla meant and their eyes saw behind each other's faces to the weight of the past massing there. And then the moment was gone and the dream passed. Carmilla cuffed away tears. "I don't know what I just said. I don't know what it meant."

"Do you-"

"It doesn't matter now." She pulled herself up to sit. The moment of understanding had gone but it had left resolve in its wake. A conclusion reached in a dream - the reasoning had vanished into smoke but none of the confidence had disappeared. "There's nothing she can do to us now. We made it. All we have to do it claim it."

She stood, unsteadily. Fresh bruises shouted at her but she ignored them. "Open the door, cupcake."

Laura shook her head in fear and held herself against the chaos in the rest of the house. From somewhere in another room was the din of a window smashing and a whirring as of the beating of a hundred wings entering in.

"It's okay. Laura, it's okay. We've won this fight. We won it a long time ago, remember? We've just got to keep winning it one more time." She held out her hand and after a moment Laura trusted it, stood up and moved away. They stood in the middle of the green room and Carmilla opened the door.

Wind tore into the room and the shadows were churning as if alive. From the smashed open front door and the windows flung wide the strange light of the storm came in, black clouds and fiery sunset all mixed into one. In the swirling darkness there were shapes, feathers, half-seen crows and glimpsed clawed hands.

"I'm waiting for you, mother," Carmilla announced. Beside her, Laura hefted the sword as if that would help.

"You hear me Mother? I'm here. You wanted me to come back and stop running away from you, well I _have_. This is my house and her house and we want you gone. Time we had a little talk, Mother."

The shadows gathered in the hallway outside, pulling together to put on flicking form and shape. They loomed over the girls.

"How does it feel to have lost, mother? You should have accepted it years ago when we killed you that first time. How does it feel that you no longer rule here? You hear me, mother? You have nothing left."

Everything surged forwards at her, the concentrated force of the shadows. It reached out like a wave coming to collapse cliffs and wash away houses, with the smell of smoke and the taste of things rotting under the earth, a great cacophony of churning sensations and all of them hungry, angry, clutching. They seized on Camilla and passed clean through. The force ebbed and hung back, profitless, with nothing in its grasp. Somewhere in the hall below was a shadow cast by a woman.

"There's nothing to you anymore, is there?" Carmilla mocked. "Nothing but empty hunger and hate and foul memories and I have _nothing_ in me left for you to use. I'm not the girl you used to control. Not for years have I had the strings for you to pull or the holes for you to get your hooks into. Laura held me while I changed." She took a breath. "So you can go to hell Mother, because I _won't_ go there for you."

Every window and mirror in the house shattered. Laura cried out, but her scream was drowned out by a louder wail, the wail of something long past the point of hopelessness going out forever. The last arm of the storm crashed through in the sky above, but it missed its grasp and went groping off to the east empty-handed. Behind it was calm, cool air and an opening in the sky that brought clean sunlight at last.

Carmilla sagged down onto the floor and let out a breath. Laura sank down beside her.

"Well that was a kick."

* * *

Holly was shivering despite the flames around them. Karn had wrapped her up in her cloak, but it did little good. Her breathing was ragged and halting as Karn cut away the shoulder of her dress and peeled away the bloody cloth to expose the knife wound.

It was not large but it was deep and it meant death without a doubt. Karn knew it and still she refused to believe it. There was no way to bind it cleanly and even if there were the bleeding was deep inside. She looked about blearily at the destruction around her. The fires were beginning to burn lower, the high point of the thwarted ritual having passed and their fuel mostly used up. The five victims were still mute witnesses, hanging like ghosts around the circle.

She tried to pull Holly into a better position. "I might be able to do something," she whispered, knowing it wasn't true. "Maybe if I turn you and also cover the wound, it will drain clean and then-"

"No." Holly steadied her hand about to move her. "Don't. Too late for that."

"Too late," Karn echoed. The words cut into her worse than the knife had.

A smile pushed its way out of Holly's pale face. "You came. I didn't think you'd come. You tried to save someone."

"Just you," she admitted. "I love you. Gods, I've hardly known you, but I love you. All this time, and you were the only one I ever found worth saving. If I could do it again I'd-"

"If." The impossibility hung there.

"We would have... we would know it right away. We'd recognise each other." Karn clung on the idea. Morgan had said - but if she was right then doing it all again would mean nothing anyway.

Holly laughed, and the laugh turned into a hacking cough and that made her shake. She steadied herself. "You're soft really. I was only starting to suspect."

Karn grimaced and found there were tears in her eyes as there had not been for so long.

"Do you want to know a secret?" Holly tugged at Karn's tunic and pulled her close. Her voice was growing weak.

"Yes." Karn leaned to hear. 

"It's not much a secret. Last night - you remember last night." Karn nodded. It was a very long time ago that Holly had been in her arms and yet it had only been one night ago. "I had a dream. I dreamed about us. Only not us."

"Not us?"

"We had a big house on a hill and we were watching the stars. You were sad, but not bad sad. Just sad for while because you'd remembered something. I was there and we were drinking something hot and you told me about the stars. Like you did in Morgan's tent. Only you said it differently."

"Differently?"

"You said the patterns don't repeat. Every time they come round again they're a little different because everything's moving around. Moving apart or moving together or something. Your philosophers didn't realise because they don't live long enough." She smiled. "How's that?"

Karn found a smile despite herself. "If it means next time I can do better, I'll take it. It might take several tries," she added and Holly nodded as vigorously as she could.

"Well yes. You're a work in progress." A shudder went through her. "I might like to kiss you again, Karn. I think I might like that very much."

When they broke apart, she had one only breath left.

* * *

The path down the hill was slippery and muddy and neither of them were properly dressed for it, but they hurried as quickly as they could nonetheless. Mircalla carried one bag and Elle the other - there had been a third packed, but practicality and speed trumped it. Mircalla had tucked her father's sword into her belt despite how absurd that would have seemed to her in a less frantic state.

Before them, the sky was ablaze in the direction of the Vordenberg house and there was the jangling of bells and the blowing of whistles coming from that direction - police coming in from Craven Arms, firefighting neighbours from everywhere that could see or hear. There was the smell of smoke in the air and the stars above wavered in the clouds.

"Around the hill," said Elle. "We want to get out of sight." Mircalla nodded and followed her lead. They took the left path at the bottom, heading for the path that wound between the wood and the fountain and thence to the eastern side of Silas Hill. The trees were dark and clawed like grasping hands but they stood for safety from prying eyes.

They reached the edge of the trees where the fountain stood. Mircalla tugged at Elle's hand to pause for breath. She put her bag down, gave Elle the sword to hold and went to wash her face clean of the grazes and scratches her mother had made. The water was so cold she didn't want to duck her head it, but she rescued the chalice from one of the bags and waved off Elle's exasperation over sentimental and inefficient packing. That made it easier, and she drank the cold water as well to clean out her mouth. In the dark, with only a pinch of moonlight, the white figure of her reflection in the water was ghostly. She cleaned herself off despite the shocking cold and looked up at the spiral carved on the back wall.

Elle was impatient with her reverie. "If we can get to the coach road-"

"You!"

Her plan was interrupted by a shout and a silhouette. They turned at the sound and drew together.

"You. It was you did this." 

The Baron Vordenberg was a mess. His clothes were hurriedly thrown together and one sleeve was singed. He was haggard, dirty, and his boots were covered in mud. He had obviously been on the way to Silas House. He fixed first Mircalla and then Elle in his gaze. From inside his jacket he pulled out a pistol. Old-fashioned, elaborate. Still deadly. The handle shone pearly in the moonlight and he levelled it at Elle.

"No-" Elle started, dropping the bags, but he pulled the trigger before she could say anything more. The gunshot broke through the night. 

Elle felt the bullet miss her by a foot and for half an instant she could not turn but when she did she saw the blood. Mircalla stood in shock, with a red laceration across her cheek. She brushed it with her gloved hand, both her hands.

Elle did not hesitate. She raised the sword, took three steps forward and ran Vordenberg through. His eyes boggled, stared, and then he collapsed to his knees, wrenching the handle out of Elle's hands. He dropped the pistol. Vordenberg's body toppled sideways and lay still on the wood floor, still with the sword through his belly.

Elle's hands went to her mouth. "Oh God. What have I done?"

Mircalla was there at once, grabbing her hands and pressing them together, kissing them, holding them to her own cheeks. "Nothing you can't spend a lifetime regretting somewhere else, sweetheart."

"We can't."

"What?" She drew away, but Elle was smiling.

"Nothing _we_ can't spend a lifetime regretting somewhere else. I just realised it: all I wanted to do was save you. And keep saving you. Every time." A doubt took her. "If that's... something you want me to do? If you-"

"Yes. God yes, it is." Mircalla's face broke out in a smile and even through the horror of the evening she looked for a moment to be purely happy. "I love you. And I'm sorry it took me so long to have the courage to-" she faltered. "We've got to go. This place will be crawling with police before long. They'll be looking for us. Everyone will be looking for us at this rate." She laughed, an absurd reaction in the circumstances, but there was a wild happiness in her that didn't care. "What do you say to north first, cupcake?"

"North?" Elle frowned and then, "Oh. _North_ , you mean?"

" _North_." Mircalla adjusted her bag. "I hear there's a sanatorium on the moors with an old friend in it. I'd like to pay her and her doctor a long overdue visit. And after that - well, how about we take that trip to the continent?"

"Austria is very nice, I hear."

"So do I. I'd like to visit a certain convent."

"Do you think they'll be glad to see you? After you abandoned them?" The words were out of her mouth before she could regret them, but Mircalla didn't take them as attacks.

"I doubt it. I gave up on them. But if I run away from that all my life, what good will that do? We'll get them out even if they hate me. Are you in?" Elle nodded. "I mean, are you really in? I'm not a new woman, Elle. I'm secretive and scared and moody and I'll have to fight every inch of what Lilita did to me every day. And that won't change fast."

She hadn't said 'my mother', Elle noticed. She smiled. "If you can't change right away, there's always the next try. So let's go do more of that." They joined hands. 

The spiral on the fountain turned in the lamplight and it occurred to Mircalla for the first time that perhaps it was not spiralling outwards, but inwards instead, seeking by the long indirect path that final place where it could rest complete. But Elle pulled her hand and they started their journey away from the hill. Behind them were the shadows of flame and death and they went onwards to the future.

"I dropped the chalice," Mircalla realised after half mile, "when he fired. I think it rolled into the woods somewhere."

"No time to look for it. We'll leave it for whoever picks it up."

* * *

The camp was smoke and broken wood in the sunless day. The bodies of Morgan's victims she burned on the remains of the fire with as much dignity as she could give them, but she cut Morgan's head clean off and drove a stake into her heart so that her soul's parts would not reunite and she could not move on to trouble the world elsewhere. She poured oil over her mother's corpse and burned it to ash and bone, and then she broke the bones on the rocks of Silas Hill before leaving them to the greedy crows.

If there were any of Morgan's followers remaining, they had scattered to the wind by the time she left the circle. The camp was all over with carrion birds which looked as if they intended to stay for a good while.

Holly's pyre was the hardest. Every remain of the camp went onto it, everything that would burn. She heaped it up and up so that it would not burn down until she herself was dead. Holly went up in a tower of flame and none of it could be as bright as her face.

When the last work was done she dropped her axe and gave it no last look. With the chalice in her hands she went to the fountain and scrubbed it clean of filth.

The water was shockingly cold as Karn sank into it. She drenched herself until her clothes were heavy and dragging and the blood from her wounds and the wounds of others stained the water red. In the bath of bloodstains she felt the chill sinking into her flesh. She dipped the chalice, drank. It froze her from the inside as well.

She knew what to expect. First would come the cold, then the surprising warmth as her body gave up. It was not the depths of winter yet but even so the water flowing from out of Silas Hill was icy and freezing would not wait long. She waited for her own death to come to her bearing the end and hoped against hope that the priests for all their absurdity had some things right and that death and forgiveness might go hand in hand.

She was sleepy and both warm and cold inside when they came out of the wood to watch her.

At first they were too far away and she strained to see the two figures. A momentary fear gripped her that this was some intrusion by living souls into her private death but then the light caught their faces and she knew them. One wore her own face, as Morgan had told her her own death would. It was her face as she had only seen it a few times in the best mirrors. Clean and unharried, no cuts or bruises, not even the fresh ones on her arms and face that she hadn't bothered to bind up. An unaccustomed face but it was hers.

The clothes her death wore were strange. There was the glint of metal and patterns that made no sense. High boots and a short leather coat. Karn tried to raise her voice in greeting but nothing came out. Her death brought forward the other and what little breath was left caught in Karn's throat. It was Holly, wrapped warm and smiling. Unharmed. She held Death's hand and the two women were in no hurry to collect Karn dying in the fountain. Indeed they hardly seemed to see her, but dawdled as if this were a sunny day in peacetime and they settled in love.

"I'm planning a new story," said the one that looked like Holly.

"Oh? And what happened to the last..." the one that looked like Karn counted on her fingers, "three that you haven't finished yet?"

"Oh, come on!" The one like Holly nudged the one like Karn and they shared a smile. "I'm a writer! Doing too many stories at once is sort of in the job description. Besides, I have new characterisation ideas now."

"Oh yeah?" The one like Karn sat down on the edge of the fountain and peered in at the water as if looking at her reflection. Karn, sitting so low that she was submerged up to her neck, looked back from a distance of a few inches away. They could almost touch.

"Yeah. I think I was a bit... glib with that soulmate AU I finished last time. It felt too easy." She drew close to the one like Karn and placed her hand on her shoulder. "I think now I understand the cost a bit better. That just because you're someone's match, doesn't mean it's easy. And it doesn't mean it's without struggle. And it doesn't mean there isn't work to be done."

"Planning to improve me, cupcake?" She looked back with a smile in her face that was half amusement and half deep, churning love.

"Planning on healing, Carm. And vice-versa, I hope. I've got my own demons as well, you know." She kissed her on the cheek. "After all, there wouldn't be much of a story if there weren't change. And our story is that we made each other better." 

Holly dabbed her fingers in the fountain and they touched, for the briefest of moment, Karn's cheek.

Some understanding passed into Karn's blurring mind and she closed her eyes on the image of the face of Holly as she could have been and might still be beyond the borders of Karn's own failure. When she opened them one last time the faces were moving away and she knew she had to follow them into the future. The chalice slipped from her fingers under the water and she did not take it up again in that life.

* * *

Laura and Carmilla passed on from the fountain and wound their way around the hill, climbing as they went. The path was always upwards. Crows scattered from their footsteps and went flying away to other places. There was frost on the high ground and the top of Silas Hill sparkled like diamond, but the sun was strong and even warm despite the coldness of the air.

"Windows first," Laura was saying. "We'll have get them repaired first or we'll freeze. Then the doorframes."

"Got to think ahead," Carmilla countered. "We're going to end up redecorating the whole thing anyway, so got to plan what it'll look like in the end. Anyway, I vote we move to a hotel tonight. Somewhere with really good room service and possibly a heated garden."

"We _are_ getting a book nook though," Laura declared in a voice that brooked no contradiction. "Get that in first."

"Obviously. And we could redo the cellar with proper electricity. Wine racks are all very well, but you need enough light to read the labels properly."

The house below looked like a shipwreck thrown up on the shore of the hill. There was broken glass everywhere, torn curtains, splintered shelves. Feathers and water and fragments of blown paper. A good quarter of the tiles had fallen off the roof. Every one of the rooms facing the west had storm debris in, some even carried from further away by the unpredictable winds. But despite the coldness of the previous night Laura and Carmilla had stayed, occupying their won territory, until the morning brought birdsong in. They had even entered Carmilla's mother's old bedroom and found it already being plundered of cushion stuffing by an enterprising robin who had come in through the wrecked window. There was a storm-tossed sprig of holly on the pillow, glowing green. Laura had it pinned in her woolly hat now.

"I wasn't afraid," Carmilla said. Laura scoffed at that. "Okay, I was scared. But I knew we could beat her because we already had. You know? I've been doing it every day, cupcake, every day since I walked out on her."

"I thought that depressed you."

"It did. But there was another way to look at it. If I was still fighting the same battle I was seven years ago, then I'd already won it." She shrugged. "Not that she was quite so... poltergeisty the last time, but still."

They reached the summit with its three crowns of rocks and looked out over the landscape. Away east there were hang-gliders launching off the Long Mynd, taking advantage of the strong sun which warmed the ground and caused the low air to rise into the colder sky. They rode the rising thermals and turned with them.

"What happened to you?" Laura asked finally. "When you were in my arms?"

She frowned. "It was strange," she said slowly. "It was a dream, that's all. At first I thought the past - my past - was pulling me down. And then I realised I was pulling it up. Or you were pulling it up, through me. Or something. I don't know," she dismissed the question. "I was apparently possessed by the ghost of my mother, so whatever. I get a pass on the searching questions for a bit, right?"

"I suppose so. We've got the future to plan." Laura pressed against her. "Hold me," she said.

"It's why I'm here."

They climbed together to the highest point and became for a brief moment the very peak of the hill. All above was the clear and peaceful sky with the storm wholly gone. And all around below the curving path that had brought them. And the past asleep in the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it from me. This has been my last Carmilla fanfic. I'm going to gush a bit now.
> 
> Back at the beginning of 2015 when I first saw Carmilla, I had never written a word of fiction before. Even though I loved reading I had never thought about writing myself except as a vague 'wouldn't it be cool if one day-'. And then I saw a little gay webseries which hit me right in the feelings and within hours had discovered fanfic. By the time Season Two ended it was obvious I was going to have to try it myself so I very cautiously and doubtingly wrote a silly little spoof fic. And then it just came pouring out and once I started I couldn't stop.
> 
> It's now two and a bit years later and I've written 320,000 words in 19 different fics. Light-hearted fluff and bloody drama and bawdy comedy and wartime trauma and witch hunts and way too much with creepy mirrors and dreams and excessive quotation. And that's just the stuff that got uploaded. Hundreds of hours of the hardest and most rewarding work I've ever done.
> 
> But now I've decided it's time to wrap things up. I want to direct my efforts to writing original fiction and developing characters of my own. Who knows, maybe one day I'll get published in actual physical form. If that ever happens it will be due in large part to the Carmilla series and in even larger part to all of you. Your encouragement and comments are the things that keep authors writing. Particularly wonderful and generous people stand out - rubyroth, geoclaire, vampire_chunks and imonlyheresoidontgetfined are all saints of the highest order - but anyone who's ever left a comment or kudos has kept me going.
> 
>  _Carmilla_ has changed me, and writing about it has changed me even more. 
> 
> Merry Christmas, Creampuffs. And thank you.


End file.
